Kirstenlee.Cinquetti (Lee Quick)

  A Big Milestone: Second Life is Rendering on Native DirectX 11 If you've been following along, you'll know I've been buried in a pretty enormous project: converting Second Life's viewer from OpenGL over to DirectX 11. And honestly? It has been painful. Horrendously complex, at times. But today I get to share something that makes all those late nights feel worth it. The image above is not OpenGL. If you look closely at the viewport, you can spot some of the early test items sitting there. That's because this is S24 running on native DirectX 11 , using HLSL shaders , for the first time. So what does this actually mean? In plain terms: a huge chunk of the engine has now been rebuilt to speak DirectX instead of OpenGL. Specifically: Most of the HLSL shaders now compile cleanly The rendering pipeline has a full DirectX equivalent All the drawpools now have DirectX counterparts Core systems like llwindow , the vertex buffer, llimage , viewertexture , and viewerdisp...