In article <47a82845@news.povray.org>, war### [at] tagpovrayorg says...
> Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote:
> > Bah.. This is why I hate bloody acronyms...
> 
>   I don't see how "HL" would be an acronym for "Halo".
> 
You never know.. You get some damn stupid acronyms some times. What 
would it be then "H"? lol

-- 
void main () {

    if version = "Vista" {
      call slow_by_half();
      call DRM_everything();
    }
    call functional_code();
  }
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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> (Obviously the "simplest" thing to do would be to assume one level of 
> DirectX and fail if any other level is present. It also seems likely that 
> it wouldn't be that hard to check and use until available features - I was 
> just checking whether that is what they actually did.)

It is complicated to make a DX9 game work with a large variety of hardware. 
For every single "technique" you use in your game code you must check the 
driver to see if the installed hardware supports it, and if it doesn't 
whether DX can supply some software emulation at a reasonable enough speed 
to support it.  It very quickly gets very messy as you need to code 
different ways to do the same effect.  Add to that you'll probably need 
several different versions of your shader code for each "generation" of 
graphics card.  It's a mess and almost impossible to get things working 100% 
correctly on 100% of "DX9-compatible" hardware.

DX10 on the other hand is much simpler.  If a card supports DX10 then it 
supports DX10.  There are a list of things that the card must support to be 
DX10 compatible, and you can just use them all without going through any 
stupid checking procedures or having 4 different code versions.  There is no 
such thing as running DX10 on a card with limited functionality (like you 
can with DX9).  DX10 also makes lots of common things (like rendering 
cube-maps, shadows etc) much simpler and faster than on DX9.

As you can imagine, writing a game that supports DX10 *and* DX9 is even 
worse.  It's a shame that DX10 doesn't work on XP or older GFX cards, but 
they had to make it that way so that in future things will be way simpler. 
Just wait a year or two and you'll probably start seeing games that are DX10 
only.

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>>       FarCry, Crysis - great games!  :)

I played FarCry 3 or 4 times now through to the finish.  If you play it on 
easy and have even an ounce of FPS experience you'll be fine.  The only 
problem for me was the very last level in that circular arena place - took 
several tries to get through that one alive.

> I only have a lowly 2.2 GHz dual-core AMD Athlon X2 4200+ with 3 GB 
> DDR-400 RAM and an nVidia GeForce 7900GTX 512 MB. It'll probably not run 
> at all...

FarCry will run fine - Crysis will struggle sometimes even at mid graphics 
options.  I have a pretty similar rig to you (except Intel Core2Duo and only 
2GB RAM) and it was certainly playable.

> BTW, I'm a little confused here. Benny seems to think that DirectX 10 is 
> available for WinXP, while I was under the impression that it's for Vista 
> only. [Part of of the M$ plan to force everybody to upgrade.] However, 
> Wikipedia at least seems to suggest that Crysis works on XP, despite using 
> DirectX 10... so... er... wuh?

DX10 will only run on Vista, the Vista display driver model is totally 
different to XP so there is now way it will ever work on XP.

Games can be written to use DX9 or DX10 if they want...

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scott <sco### [at] laptopcom> wrote:
> Just wait a year or two and you'll probably start seeing games that are DX10 
> only.

  Which is a pitty, really, because I won't be able to play them.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote:
> >   I don't see how "HL" would be an acronym for "Halo".
> > 
> You never know.. You get some damn stupid acronyms some times. What 
> would it be then "H"? lol

  "Halo" doesn't need to be acronymified because it's short already.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>> Isn't that rather like siting how many people have climbed Everest, 
>> thus *proving* that it's not impossibly difficult?
> 
> Climbing Everest *isn't* impossibly difficult.  Extremely hard, yes, but 
> not impossible, nor even unthinkable.

Hmm, let me see now... And how many people have actually achieved this 
in all of human history? 6? 8? It's a pretty small number, given how 
many millions of humans are out there. ;-)

-- 
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Invisible wrote:

> You're telling me a human being can survive falling from more than 12 feet?

I rephrase:

There are people who have eaten broken glass and lived. There are people 
who have been drowned for 35 minutes and survived without brain damage. 
And there are people who have survived cyanide poisoning. However, 
*normally* all of these are fatal.

Are you telling me it's *normal* for a human being to survive a 4-story 
drop?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> Just wait a year or two and you'll probably start seeing games that are 
>> DX10
>> only.
>
>  Which is a pitty, really, because I won't be able to play them.

Yeh, I wish I could play games like Crysis on my 386 running DOS too :-) 
Would never need to upgrade then!

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Invisible wrote:
>>> Isn't that rather like siting how many people have climbed Everest, 
>>> thus *proving* that it's not impossibly difficult?
>>
>> Climbing Everest *isn't* impossibly difficult.  Extremely hard, yes, 
>> but not impossible, nor even unthinkable.
> 
> Hmm, let me see now... And how many people have actually achieved this 
> in all of human history? 6? 8? It's a pretty small number, given how 
> many millions of humans are out there. ;-)

Rubbish! You get more than that on the summit at once if the weather's 
good, these days.

:)

PS I'm not joking.

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>>> Isn't that rather like siting how many people have climbed Everest, thus 
>>> *proving* that it's not impossibly difficult?
>>
>> Climbing Everest *isn't* impossibly difficult.  Extremely hard, yes, but 
>> not impossible, nor even unthinkable.
>
> Hmm, let me see now... And how many people have actually achieved this in 
> all of human history? 6? 8? It's a pretty small number, given how many 
> millions of humans are out there. ;-)

How many people have sat in my desk chair?  Only 2 or maybe 3 of the 6 
billion people in the world - it must be *really* difficult!

Anyway, to quote from Google:

"Because of the extreme conditions experienced on Mount Everest, fatalities 
are commonplace. To date, 179 people have died trying to reach the summit, 
which sets the fatality rate at around nine percent. Most of these 
fatalities happened before 1990. In the last ten years, advances in climbing 
equipment and more experienced guides have resulted in a steep drop in 
fatality statistics: from 37% in 1990 to 4.4% in 2004."

So it seems that if you are well prepared then you can expect a 90 - 95% 
chance of success.  Still pretty low compared to most other mountains, and I 
don't think I would like to go somewhere with even a 5% chance of not coming 
back.

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