2010-07-31, 09:29 AM
I was fortunately able to track the bug down to the pixel shader I'd hastily thrown together to do the fullscreen blit with no frills. I'd declared a texcoord semantic with float instead of float2 and that made it act like a 1D texture (for some reason turned on its side) even though the tex2D intrinsic was used.
It looks really good. Maybe cleaner than the original. It was a little sluggish at first until I thought to force the sampler to a point filter. Now it plays without missing a beat at 1920x1200. My computers are all miniature, decent for games, but not awesome by any means. So this is not bad.
The only thing keeping me from serving it up immediately is I should add some stuff to make sure it's only used when the game is actually in 16bpp mode. And the text is not being drawn for some reason I don't understand. My guess is the GDI based text routines are not compatible with render targets which are never supported in off device memory afaik. In fact I think the text routines are not generally serviceable with D3D9. I don't know how it implements it, but it suggests if you must use them to render them to system memory then transport that to video memory to be composited with your picture.
Fortunately I think I have all the necessary text routines already hooked, and can use the same interfaces I used to setup the green overlay text to draw the game text (with higher quality (than the green) of course) in a hardware friendly way... in fact I have a feeling the results would be nearly identical if not better so, which makes me wonder why the drivers wouldn't just handle this stuff transparently. But you can do it a bit more efficiently if you do it yourself, so maybe it's a good idea to not give software developers a crutch.
Ultimately it's not a good idea to apply the fullscreen blit after the menus have been drawn, but it will be good enough for now until I can figure something else out. If I integrated other effects into the blit you probably only want them effecting the game / not the menus and stuff. It will be interesting to work out the timing for that when the time comes.
Yes the green text made it thru just fine, so everything should work out eventually. I think I will provide an option to leave out the sliver of shadow in the text, because that's really not worth the performance penalty. And modern text rendering can be very intensive. I actually have a feeling I'm seeing better performance than ever. It's smooth as silk frame rate wise anyway.
It looks really good. Maybe cleaner than the original. It was a little sluggish at first until I thought to force the sampler to a point filter. Now it plays without missing a beat at 1920x1200. My computers are all miniature, decent for games, but not awesome by any means. So this is not bad.
The only thing keeping me from serving it up immediately is I should add some stuff to make sure it's only used when the game is actually in 16bpp mode. And the text is not being drawn for some reason I don't understand. My guess is the GDI based text routines are not compatible with render targets which are never supported in off device memory afaik. In fact I think the text routines are not generally serviceable with D3D9. I don't know how it implements it, but it suggests if you must use them to render them to system memory then transport that to video memory to be composited with your picture.
Fortunately I think I have all the necessary text routines already hooked, and can use the same interfaces I used to setup the green overlay text to draw the game text (with higher quality (than the green) of course) in a hardware friendly way... in fact I have a feeling the results would be nearly identical if not better so, which makes me wonder why the drivers wouldn't just handle this stuff transparently. But you can do it a bit more efficiently if you do it yourself, so maybe it's a good idea to not give software developers a crutch.
Ultimately it's not a good idea to apply the fullscreen blit after the menus have been drawn, but it will be good enough for now until I can figure something else out. If I integrated other effects into the blit you probably only want them effecting the game / not the menus and stuff. It will be interesting to work out the timing for that when the time comes.
Yes the green text made it thru just fine, so everything should work out eventually. I think I will provide an option to leave out the sliver of shadow in the text, because that's really not worth the performance penalty. And modern text rendering can be very intensive. I actually have a feeling I'm seeing better performance than ever. It's smooth as silk frame rate wise anyway.