S24 - DirectX status / update

 

First Log In! This is fine :)

Kirsten's Quest for DirectX: Welcome to Second Life, Circa 1999

Ok — welcome to Second Life, circa LOL%^&%XYZblarhg! 

Now, before you panic at that screenshot: it looks like a catastrophe, but I promise you it isn't. In fact, it's exactly what I was expecting to see. That garbled, wrong-way-up, "did-a-cat-walk-across-the-GPU" mess is a milestone, not a disaster. Let me explain why.

Here's the short version: DirectX and OpenGL think about the screen in completely different ways. They disagree about something as fundamental as where the corner of the screen even is. So when you take a renderer that's spent its whole life speaking OpenGL and start whispering DirectX to it instead, the very first thing it does is hand you back a beautiful, expected kind of wrong. Seeing this specific flavour of wrong means the pipeline is alive — it's just holding the map upside down :)

One week later: 

How We Got Here: The Roadmap So Far

For anyone just tuning in, this hasn't been a single heroic idle tuesday of coding — it's been a staged campaign, and each stage earns the next one:

• Stages 1–2 — The Rosetta Stone. First came the shaders: translating GLSL into HLSL, teaching the two languages to say the same thing. Then the most basic scaffolding imaginable — just enough to get a startup and spawn a window. Four walls and a door.
• Stage 3–4 — First Life. In my last post, this scaffolding paid off with a successful startup all the way to the login screen. The engine woke up and knew its own name.
• Stage 5 — Building the Engine. Widening the scope, giving the thing more of itself to work with.
• Stage 6 — The Discovery Phase. Real boring. Hunting down errors, cornering bugs, and generally clearing the runway to prepare for a real first login.
• Stage 7 — Final Prep. Tightening every angle to prevent a massive crash.
• Stage 8 — Switch On! And that's where we are right now.

Things are looking more normal now — and the About floater now reports the API in use, not the GL version. 🙂 Next up: I'm in render finalize, wiring up the components still sitting dark (glow, and much more). The world looks circa 2002 right now, but it's gaining traction — and as technical as this is, the process is genuinely evocative. Every day, this coming to the grid feels a little closer.

Materials and the first simple sky are in. Water is still black — its components aren't fully active yet, and alpha has two separate paths to sort out (go figure). Also note my primitar boots: the rigged mesh is wired up but not switched on at this point.

The World Builder Feeling

This whole experience keeps reminding me of a short film from a few years back called World Builder. If you've never seen it, watch it — it's worth three minutes of your life:

https://youtu.be/OX1hSQwnngo?si=HtdM1XKBD79CAhQ3

In it, a man stands in an empty space and conjures a world into being one piece at a time — placing a lamppost, adjusting a tree, coaxing light into existence with his hands.

That's precisely what this feels like. I'm currently walking around a Second Life where each component of the render is being switched on, manipulated, and fired up for the very first time in a brand-new API. Quite literally turning on the lights, one by one — and watching a familiar world flicker back to life through completely new eyes.

It's a strange and wonderful thing to witness. More soon — the lights are still coming up. 

If all goes well I expect a pre-alpha for testing in a month , possibly depends on my time and what falls out of the switch on!

Much Love,

KL