[GDI/DDraw7/D3D9] Dynamic palette support?

Xeeynamo · 2012-02-09T20:05:50

Hi! I'm trying to do a porting of a 2D game from SNES/Genesis era on Windows. This game is tile-based in 16x16 images, 8 bit per pixel and a palette large 256 entries with 16 bit of depth. I develop already a level editor using GDI and I'm able to render an entire level with dynamic palette and dynamic tiles in 1680x1050 in 24 frame per second (i think that it's a good result) using various DC in 4bpp and 8bpp. After developed level editor, I started to create the real game, so I started to learn DirectDraw. With it I had a lot of problems like the surfaces in 4bpp that can be created but can't be blitted on backbuffer; after a lot of tries and combinations I was able to create a surface in 8bpp palettized and render the entire level like GDI at 26 fps but with the 90% of use of GPU (!!!) without to be able to flip/mirror the tiles. After this fail I decided to learn Direct3D. With it I'm able to set a good viewport for X0 Y0 at top-left and X640 Y480 at bottom-right and draw squares with textures using integer coordinates like GDI and DirectDraw, but not to create surfaces or textures palettized. I tried CheckDeviceType and I discovered also that my graphic card doesn't support 16bpp surfaces in fullscreen mode and now I don't know how to proceed without to use a lot of memory and without to have bad performances. The summary of my situation is this: I can use GDI, it can create any DC in 2bpp, 4bpp, 8bpp all paletized, 16 and 32bpp, stretch support, flip/mirroring but trasparence blit without flipping and all this via software rendering with a good use of CPU. I can use DirectDraw, it can create surfaces in 8bpp palettized, 16 and 32bpp, stretch support and full transparence support, but no flip/mirroring and with intense use of CPU and GPU using FastBlt I can use Direct3D, but it cannot create surfaces different from 32bpp and lacks of palette support, stretch and flip/mirroring with projection, no support for transparent textures and with intense use of CPU and a good use of GPU using DrawPrimitives with strip triangles. Seems that new technologies lacks a lot of features and to reach my intention the easy way is to use GDI. It's possible that if an image uses less than 256 colors I'm forced to convert it in X8R8G8B8 without palette support? I studied also some consoles and also PSP and PS2 uses 8BPP textures with dynamic palettes, so I don't understand these limits from DirectX. Also with Direct3D9 to render 1200 squares (strip triangles with 4 vertices) uses 70% of a single CPU core, so really I don't understand how some games can render a lot of graphics without lags or how some porting or emulators uses dynamic palettes. Maybe I miss some key information to go to the right way to realize this porting. I'll wait someone that can clear my ideas here.

Graphics and GPU Programming Programming

Started by Xeeynamo February 04, 2012 01:53 PM

9 comments, last by Xeeynamo 12 years, 2 months ago

Xeeynamo

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February 09, 2012 08:05 PM

Out of interest, how are you loading them? D3DXCreateTextureFromFile? Surely D3D will still be trying to create a D3DFMT_P8 format texture or similar behind the scenes (Which is very poorly supported)?

Yes, I'm using D3DXCreateTextureFromFile

[GDI/DDraw7/D3D9] Dynamic palette support?

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[GDI/DDraw7/D3D9] Dynamic palette support?

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