Hi Fraser, actually I sent you an e-mail reply about that a couple of days ago - maybe check your junk mail folder to see if it went there?


> I'm curious how well MOI performs with Remote Desktop
> on a Mac which doesn't support DirectX. However, OpenGL
> seems to work fine locally with Google Earth. I don't suppose
> that there is a hidden preference somewhere?

OpenGL can work in some situations like that because it has a software-only fallback renderer. So it's able to generate something in cases where hardware acceleration is not present. However that tends to be extremely slower than actual video-card assisted hardware accelerated rendering, so it's something that will only really be feasible for low complexity things.

Direct3D9 does not have that kind of software-only renderer, so if you don't have a hardware card to use with Direct3D (which will be the case if your display is via Remote Desktop) you won't be able to get a display.

So no, there's no hidden preference for that - MoI requires a hardware accelerated device to be present for the display in order for it to be able to work.


> If your code doesn't depend on DX9, would adding an optional OpenGL
> implementation in 2.x be a huge project?

Well, the code currently uses DX9, so it does depend on it right now.

For the most part though it just sends over a bunch of polygon and texture data - this part is not very hard to do with OpenGL as well. But there is one particular part which is more tricky though which is displaying text - that currently uses a DirectX specific library and switching that over will require a good replacement.

That part will take a while, possibly involving numerous tests with a few different candidates. That's not terrible but still will be fairly time consuming. I probably won't be able to incorporate that into the v3 timeframe, since I have already spent a huge amount of time just removing the mshtml dependency and moving to Webkit, so my time budget for conversion type tasks is kind of way over the limit already for v3. As soon as I'm done with the webkit conversion I really want to switch to more regular feature development for v3 rather than more conversion type work, other than some fine tuning if needed for WINE support.

So no, I do not expect to have an optional OpenGL implementation for MoI v3 - maybe in some future version though.

Thanks,
- Michael