Jan 3, 2000
I haven't been making any updates because I've had
some frustrating time trying to get this to work on
all video cards. Using my Intergraph Intense Voodoo Rage
it works fine, however on some other cards it does not
show textures, which is very ugly. When I debug
it I don't get any error codes or information about whats
wrong. In general I have to conclude that Direct 3D is
not a good API for successfully doing what it is supposed
to do - abstract away the details of the video cards.
I was also unable to get fog to work. DirectX 7 has not
updated the Direct 3D "Retained Mode" that I was using,
I haven't done any research to see if this has made any changes
to the plug in behavior on various video cards. If anyone
has any suggestions please let me know, I'd like to
release a patch. I also haven't had luck getting fog to work.
At the moment its looking like my suggestion is as follows:
don't use Direct 3D retained mode. Use either OpenGL or
Direct 3D immediate mode. Either way you're going to have a lot
of difficulty getting something to work on all cards. If you
use Direct 3D immediate mode I am forced to suggest that you
cut and paste all the sample code and start with that - trying
to get a Direct 3D program up and running from scatch like I
did is not worth the effort. It is a sad thing that an API
requires so much difficult code just to get a full screen
video display, but you can take that complaint to Microsoft.
March 23, 1999
Version 1.2 now complete. A lot of improvements have gone in,
finally after all that trouble getting hardware and full
screen working I was able to concentrate on the 3D stuff again.
I now default to full screen with hardware acceleration when
you first install it - if this doesn't work you can
use the configuration dialog to use the RAMP driver and run
in a window.
March 23, 1999
Overhaul to web page. Although the frames were nice, I couldn't
figure out how to avoid the constant popup ads from Geocities. By
incorporating a banner into the page directly and
reorganizing I think the site will be faster and more to the point
for most visits.
March 8, 1999
Finally got version 1.1 up onto the web. There
are still some problems, need feedback on how it
runs on different machines.
This version has a lot more features, I'm demonstrating
a fair bit of possible configuration.
On my machine the RAMP runs slow but with proper
lighting. I can also run fullscreen, and with
3D acceleration. However the lighting is not correct -
there seems to be a strong ambient light in that
case.
I confirmed that DX 6.1 broke my pervious version.
From some reason it no longer accepts a NULL argument
to create a default device. Irritating.
Febuary 16, 1998
My latest version is just about complete. However it
is still having trouble running reliably on the different
machines that I try.
It seems that some drivers don't function at all using
the default D3D driver that I was using in version 1.0.
Irritating because that means that version 1.0 doesn't
work at all on some machines.
My latest version lets you choose the driver and whether
to run full screen. That at least lets the user tinker
around until they find a setting that works, but
that is UGLY! Doesn't look like I have much choice
thanks to the difficulty in getting D3D to run optimally
on a computer. The sample programs from Microsoft literally
have hundreds of lines of device configuration code
duplicated in each example - and they still don't run very
well.
But the good news - with hardware acceleration and
full screen mode the plugin runs really fast. So
I'm rushing to get the next version out. I haven't
been publicizing this site at all yet until I have it
finished.
January 25, 1999
Did some work on getting full screen to work, looks like
its going to be a bit of a bitch. -Andrew
January 15, 1999
Hi! The first version of vis_d3D released. There will be updates soon. See release notes -Andrew