About time, well done Microsoft.
Their implementation of backwards compatability in DirectX has been completely ludicrous since they started. The whole way that API routines were called was flawed by design.
Anyone remember their Amiga? DirectX is much like a library on the Amiga. You could chop and change library versions and all the programs that relied on it still worked perfectly. When a library function was updated, the Amiga programmer didn't have to call a new function. With DirectX you had to call SomeDirectXFunction6 or SomeDirectXFunction7 etc etc depending on the DirectX version you wished to use.
So, DirectX9 contains all the functions for 9, 8, 7 and probably previous ones as well even though they mostly do the same thing. If the number of arguments for a DirectX function changed between versions, you had to have a new function name.
Why not use extendable structures to pass arguments? We managed it on the Amiga and we didn't see any speed penalties on our 7MHz CPU's.
I'm glad Microsoft have sorted DirectX out. Sure, it's going to be a real pain in the proverbial for the changeover period but it had to be done sooner or later. It should have happened between DirectX 7 and 8, but I guess the infamous Microsoft Coder Laziness manifested once more.
Their implementation of backwards compatability in DirectX has been completely ludicrous since they started. The whole way that API routines were called was flawed by design.
Anyone remember their Amiga? DirectX is much like a library on the Amiga. You could chop and change library versions and all the programs that relied on it still worked perfectly. When a library function was updated, the Amiga programmer didn't have to call a new function. With DirectX you had to call SomeDirectXFunction6 or SomeDirectXFunction7 etc etc depending on the DirectX version you wished to use.
So, DirectX9 contains all the functions for 9, 8, 7 and probably previous ones as well even though they mostly do the same thing. If the number of arguments for a DirectX function changed between versions, you had to have a new function name.
Why not use extendable structures to pass arguments? We managed it on the Amiga and we didn't see any speed penalties on our 7MHz CPU's.
I'm glad Microsoft have sorted DirectX out. Sure, it's going to be a real pain in the proverbial for the changeover period but it had to be done sooner or later. It should have happened between DirectX 7 and 8, but I guess the infamous Microsoft Coder Laziness manifested once more.