Valve To Support DX10 With Episode 2

In an interview with Game Informer from last week, representatives from Valve confirmed that they'll be supporting DirectX 10 functionality in the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2. This will be the case even for those folks who haven't upgraded to Vista yet. No worries if you don't have a DX10 card, though. They've got functionality nailed all the way back to DirectX 8, and are trying to push it all the way back to 7.

Comments

Screw you Valve

[ShadowsHawk]

I love the Half Life series, but I really hope they didn't delay Ep2 just so they could put DX10 in there. What happened to the short development and low cost of episodic gaming? This is just another slap in the face for fans of the series.

Delay

[fistfullast33l]

I don't think the delay was primarily DX10. I think between both next gen consoles and DX10 migration, they had their hands full. They had to develop code for both the hardware and the network for each console, which takes a pretty long time. They figured that it'd probably take them a while to put this one out, but they figured that after this they had the channels set up to deploy episodes much more quickly for the next gen products.

Re:Delay

[PingSpike]

I agree. This is whats so annoying. Valve positions themselves as the champion of episodic gaming, then when it comes time for execution they do virtually everything completely wrong. Its like they don't even actually understand what episodic games are suppose to be. I personally don't care for episodic games, but understanding that there is a audience out there hungry for them its pretty annoying to watch valve botch delivery over and over again.

Its "release often" with new levels and story. Thats it. You must meet the release date to make episodic gaming work. I guess its not surprising that valve, who in their short history has made their name a synonym for delays screws this up so bad. Is something holding the release up? Then cut it. Console ports? New graphical features? Cut it, and release it later. There will be more episodes, you can include the features then. And your stuff comes over the steam platform...release now, add that crap later. Parent said, the focus is on content...and I'd say content delivered regularly.

Its in the name, episodic. They want people to come home on friday (end of the month, quarter, whatever) and go "Oh good! Its X day! I'll go buy the latest episode off of steam!" The very idea of episodic gaming business model is that it becomes habit to buy the episodes. This doesn't work if the people come home and go "Oh good! Its X day!" and then find out the episodic is delayed until next tuesday. You move the schedule around and they're going to stop looking out for the release. You can't expect people to make buying your games a habit if you can't make releasing it on time a habit too. And here's a little secret...all the episodes don't even have to be good, just the first few and most of the rest. Same way with TV shows, even my favorite shows have crummy episodes that I watch anyway because...its a habit.

Re:DX10 on Windows XP?

[Aadain2001]

MS has said that DX10 will be Vista only, so if you are using XP you won't be able to use any of the DX10 features of the Source engine. Of course when MS realizes that almost nobody is buying/using Vista and DX10, they'll make a port for DX10 back to XP. They just won't do it for a year or two.

Re:DX10 on Windows XP?

[Tackhead]

> How do they access DX10 features in the Source engine on XP? If that is the case, why upgrade to Vista for DX10 at all?

Today: "Valve to support DX10 with Episode 2"
The Mysterious Future: "Microsoft to support DX10 on XP with the release of Duke Nukem Forever."

Great but...

[LingNoi]

...I would rather they spent time making the Source engine use openGL so that game developers would be able to use the Source engine on the Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, etc.

Unreal 3 is openGL hence why more companies are using that compared to Valve's Source engine. Hopefully they will get the hint sooner rather then later.

Both DirectX and openGL just tell the gfx card what to do. The fact that they decided to use DirectX which only works on Microsoft platforms for a game engine they're trying to license to other companies is pretty stupid from a business point of view.

Re:Great but...

[ardor]

...I would rather they spent time making the Source engine use openGL so that game developers would be able to use the Source engine on the Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, etc.

Unreal 3 is openGL hence why more companies are using that compared to Valve's Source engine. Hopefully they will get the hint sooner rather then later.

You do realize that PS3 and the like use OpenGL ES, which is NOT the same as the GL on computers?
Besides, they have tons of custom extensions necessary to use these machines efficiently...

Oh, and forget about a Source rewrite for OpenGL. There just is not point in this. Direct3D works on the platform 96% of all PC gamers use. A rewrite is EXTREMELY time-consuming, because of the differences in the API designs. We're talking about at least a 6-month-delay here (very likely more).

Both DirectX and openGL just tell the gfx card what to do.
But not equally. GL binds sampler states to a texture, D3D binds them to sampler stages. D3D has +Z as "inward", OpenGL -Z. D3D has +Y as "down", OpenGL "up". There is no equivalent to an OpenGL rectangle texture in Direct3D. The GLSL API works quite differently than the HLSL one etc. Do you want to finance the rewrite, the bug-fixing, beta-testing?

The fact that they decided to use DirectX which only works on Microsoft platforms for a game engine they're trying to license to other companies is pretty stupid from a business point of view.

"Only" is quite funny. Windows is an enormous gaming platform. Also, you get Xbox support nearly for free. As for machines like the PS3 and the Wii, forget about having one universal engine for all of them. ALL AAA titles are written specifically for one title, and maybe ported to another, requiring substantial rewrites (this is why usually console titles arent ported to other consoles). Try porting Shadow Of The Colossus from PS2 to Wii for example.

Sorry, but your suggestions are absolutely suicidal for all but the wealthiest of all game development companies. Because of the ARB being much too slow, OpenGL stagnated in the important years 1996-2001. Heck, a decent render-to-texture mechanism got introduced 2005, while DirectX already had one 1998. OpenGL was in an excellent position back in the 90s: Direct3D 3 sucked, OpenGL was better, easier, finer. But if you have graphics card manufacturers and game developers on one side, demanding more features, and an obscenely slow ARB on the other side, there can be only one solution - create another API. Nowadays many codebases are D3D based precisely because OpenGL just sucked in the post-D3D7 era. And rewriting the entire codebase is suicide, as already said. Which is a shame, because OpenGL is pretty decent now, and if the OpenGL 3 rumors are right, it will rock.

Re:Great but...

[vonPoonBurGer]

ALL AAA titles are written specifically for one title, and maybe ported to another, requiring substantial rewrites

First, I'm assuming you meant to say that all AAA titles are written specifically for one platform, etc. Assuming that is what you meant, I also think this is a pretty faulty statement. Have you looked at console gaming lately? The majority of titles out there appear on at least two consoles, if not all three. The latest iteration of the Call of Duty franchise would be a good example. It can be found on the Xbox and Xbox 360 and PS2 and PS3 and Wii. Clearly it's not that onerous to port from one system to another, if the makers of A and AA titles are willing to spend the money to do so. They're clearly getting back more money than it costs them to do the port, probably many times over, otherwise they wouldn't keep doing it.

The reason AAA titles don't get ported has very little to do with technical details, and a whole lot to do with marketing and business strategy. In the console world, developers making a AAA title shop their project to the various console manufacturers, and hope to make it an exclusive for one of those systems. In return, the console make cuts them a nice fat check. That check buys them the time they need to spend on polishing the game in order to make it a AAA title. In the case of Valve, there is no real competition in the PC gaming space, so there's no manufacturers to play off each other in order to get a check for making your game exclusive. But Valve doesn't really need the money anyway, they've got quite a nice little warchest as it is. They could easily spend the money to either hire talent or outsource production to allow ports of their games. However, they don't want to give up creative control, or have some semiautonomous internal division produce a half-assed port. Basically, they don't want to risk "diluting their brand" through ports. Either way you slice it, though, it's a marketing/business thing, not a technology thing.

Re:I'm confused. . .

[amuro98]

Valve is saying that Episode 2 will support DX 9 AND 10 (AND 8 and...7?) If you have Vista and a DX10 compatible video card you'll be using DX10.

If you're like the rest of the world, and still using XP, you'll use DX9 (or 8 - I guess depending on your video card.)

Right now, there is no way to use DX10 under anything other than Vista.

The biggest deals

[Sycraft-fu]

1) No caps bits. Previously, cards could support a rather wide or narrow range of a DirectX spec and still be at that level. They ten set caps (capability) bits to let software know what they could do. Major pain for developers. DirectX 10 does away with that. There's a sepc and you either meet it or you don't. There's no performance requirements, just features. So if a card is DX10, you know it supports a given feature set.

2) Unified shader API. All shaders (pixel, vertex and geometry) are talked to in the same fashion in DX10. Makes for easier design. However it also allows unification on the back end. Though it isn't required, as a practical matter the shaders will be unified on the cards. The GeForce 8800, the only DX10 card out, has unified hardware shaders and ATi's R600 will as well when it hits the market. This means that shaders can be tasked to different things as needed. If a scene is complex pixel shading wise but simple vertex wise, no problem, the shaders can do that, and then switch around the very next scene.

3) Geometry shaders. DX9 didn't support them, and DX9 class hardware doesn't have them.

4) Support for video memory virtualization and preemptive multitasking of the GPU. Basically giving the GPU to really share its resources effectively.

Re:DX10 on Windows XP?

[7Prime]

To a certain degree, I agree, but it is getting worse.

When Windows 95, everyone jumped on board, at least, most tried to and did so fairly quickly. Windows 98 came along, people were fine with jumping on fairly quickly. Even ME came out, and a lot of unfortunate fools decided to upgrade. But then when XP came out, people were a lot more reluctant (possibly because of the ME debacle), in fact, if anything, XP showed people how similar 2000 was, and MANY companies simply "upgraded" to 2000, and went for years without upgrading to XP. Only just a year ago, in 2006, many computers in the company I work for ran 2000. Now, it's probably accurate to say that a good 90% are on XP, and people are fairly comfortable with XP, but aren't willing to switch. So, at this point, Microsoft, in about 3 cycles, has gotten about an entire cycle out of sync with the public. So, yes, Vista isn't going away, but upgrade adoption of Windows versions IS getting undeniably slower, so things are changing. Interestingly, if MS had been able to release Vista two years ago, they probably would have gotten A LOT more adopters.

The bottom line is that Microsoft's constant delays are bringing to attention a lot of concerns about the quality of their product line. The result is that the slower Microsoft becomes in releasing new versions, the slower, still, the public will be to snatch it up.