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[Mnemonic]

Next release of WME will drop support for DirectDraw. What does it mean? From now on WME games will require 3D accelerated video card (just like when you enable the "Require 3D acceleration" option in ProjectMan in current releases). 3D accelerated videocards are a standard for several years now, and even 2D game WME develpers intentionally require 3D acceleration in their games, therefore I believe there's no point in supporting the "compatibility mode" any longer.

The DirectDraw renderer will be still present in the engine, but it will be only available via troubleshooting options and it will not be officially supported (and it will not provide new features added to the accelerated renderer).

Comments?

[Mnemonic]

And to avoid confusion, you can of course still create 2D games in WME

[Stucki]

i think this should be fine. as you say 3d cards are standard today and do add a lot of possibilities to adventure games.
but i am not very objective on this because i cant wait to profit from the new 3d features ...

stucki
 

[Daniel]

As I see no point in creating games for extremely low-end machines, I'm perfectly ok with this drop of support for DirectDraw.

[sychron]

Didn't Microsoft drop DirectDraw years ago (merging it into Direct3D)?

[Jyujinkai]

Yea.... they are also dropping direct X as we know it.. All past hardware will no longer support directX 10.1 + it is basically a totally new format.

Microsoft revealed that the upcoming update to be introduced to the current version of DirectX will no longer be compatible with the existing graphics cards

[Mnemonic]

Didn't Microsoft drop DirectDraw years ago (merging it into Direct3D)?

Well, yeah, but Microsoft's decisions don't always reflect reality Anyway, WME 1.8.5 came sooner than I originally expected, so DirectDraw support is now officially dropped.

[sychron]

Well, they may change the HAL-Side API of DirectX as often as they want, all major hardware vendors will program new drivers. BUT ... if they change the coder's side of the API ... hell might break loose. On second thought, changing the long grown directx API to something more usable might not be that bad at all. Imagine a full featured managed DirectX without any COM-dangling. I would like that ;-)

[chris974]

Hi - i'm very new to Wintermute engine. I very much like the look of it so far - but just trying to get started at the moment. Although I have a recent computer, i'd like the ability to use (and test) the editor in a VMWare windows XP. I'm only looking to make a 2d game - and was trying to figure out how to run it without requiring 3d acceleration.

Basically - VMWare can't utilise the 3d card so WME doesn't see it. I can run a 2d Wintermute game fine on the vmware windows instance - but when I try to run a game from the editor (F5) it gives me no option and says it requires 3d acceleration. I looked everywhere for options to not use 3d acceleration in the editor - before searching and finding these posts. I understand from this announcement that 3d acceleration is now required - but apparently the old direct draw stuff is still availalble in "troubleshoot options"? I haven't been able to find anything about the trouble shoot options in the editor menus or the options when trying to run a game - is there something that i have to manually add to a configuration file?

In the end i'm not worried about the game requiring 3d acceleration but would like to be able to override that just for purposes of development. Alternatively.. maybe there is a slightly older version of the engine I could use? But from what i can tell older versions aren't available for download.

[Mnemonic]

DirectDraw support can be re-enabled by creating a file called "wme.ini" in the game directory, which will contain the following lines:

Code: [Select]

[Debug]
AllowDirectDraw=1

However, unfortunately this will not work when running the game from ProjectMan, because in that case the wme.ini is overriden by the project file.
In theory you could add these lines to the project file, but ProjectMan will overwrite them

[Mnemonic]

Hmm, I found a workaround. Import this REG file, and it will permanently enable DirectDraw.

[chris974]

Just added this and it works perfectly. Thanks so much for the quick response - the level of support is encouraging. Looking forward to getting stuck into my project.