Official DX9 reinstatement CRUSADE THREAD!! Hear ye! Hear ye! Did you hear about the abject tragedy that is the final disappearance of ye olde classic dx9 rf2 that has bought us so much delight over the years? It's horrible. Grown men are crying all over the place. Just look at these poor guys here https://forum.studio-397.com/index.php?threads/tv-broadcast-overlay-plugin-dx11.57743/ Yes! Never did I expect back when I got this my first game back near the start, that I would see 24 hour races being hosted! Yeah not 24 time accelerated hours, 24 actual hours! With like 80 drivers, and driver swaps! That's not even the half of it. For there is a commentary team recruited in for the spectacular event that's been an entire year in the planning! And they got TV style overlay graphics, the whole thing being broadcast to fans live on you tube! Amazing. And then they even do driver interviews after the race! All this for free by volunteers with a rich ecosystem of great and capable plugins. All these overlay plugins are made possible by a clever hack that involves hooking the dx9 EndScene() function that is being called all the time to draw the stuff. You can intercept it, and draw your own stuff - on a 2d surface overlaying a 3d full screen surface. And then the regular Endscene gets automatically called afterwards and draws the rf2 stuff. Now, if you do just a little nifty programming in this intercepted EndScene call you can acheive simply fantastic results, in full screen mode, and with the maximum efficiency and thus very limited reduction in FPS. Yes huge amounts of functionality, and very limited effect on FPS. That's the beauty of this clever trick that makes some amazing overlay plugins possible. This clever trick that I describe does not work on dx11, and I believe it never will. There is no EndScene in dx11, this whole EndScene hooking thing and putting a 2d overlay on a 3d fullscreen with little performance loss, you basically cannot do it any more and there is no alternative. Dx11 works differently. The Trackmap plugin is another casualty. Many beleive this to be the greatest plugin ever created. Lets be honest, the default hud does what it does, it's ok, but there no comparison between this or even other alternatives and trackmap! In fact, there is no sim even that can boast that it has better instrumentation than rf2+trackmap. Pcars, AC, iRacing, none of them can claim they can do anything like trackmap. The great thing about trackmap is it totally customisable, everything, just everything, you can change, move and personalise to your own taste. Some like to slap the dash up like the starship enterprise. Others like to have minimum screen intrusion with maximum information. 20 different tachos to choose from alone! Just so much choice, functionality and freedom. And performance! All this costs very little fps. So these are awesome plugins, all consigned to history on Friday. Obviously moving rf2 to dx11 is a great idea, and will set rf2 up nicely for the future. I get the feeling s397 might develop something similar to trackmap, and there might be some alternative method of doing overlays, but this is all only a maybe, and 6-12 months away. Sure we've had 18 months notice that dx9 is going. Of course we have. But even so, isn't it worth considering, that almost since the beginning we have always had these things. These awesome plugins. The TV broadcasts, the trackmap. And perhaps in the very next build in only 6 months time there may indeed be a real alternative to trackmap, and maybe even a different way to do overlays. So we just went 18 months holding out on dx9, and maybe in 6 months we gonna have alternatives, but right now, and for 6 months, we have nothing. A glut. As others take delight in their new VR features we are left high and dry and crying. Just seems a shame to have this limited period of no alternatives. TV coverage busted up, trackmap put out to pasture. I think it's stupid to ask that a dx9 version be maintained with bug fixes and support. Obviously. But I don't think anything so burdensome is necessary. I think it's highly likely, that we could take that existing 1109-dx9 build and just rebuild and change nothing. Except the build number. So we can race online. I think it's highly likely that will work just fine! And everybody is happy! Just simply put out the 1109-dx9 with an updated build no, I doubt much changed with the server. We just need the build no to match! We can all live together for a build or two longer, in peace, and harmony! Even better, by then we might well have viable alternatives to what we currently have. So no support, no bug fixes, no nothing, just 1109-dx9 with an updated build no, and me and many others will be very happy with that. If that can be done without too much work I for one would be thoroughly grateful to s397 if they can consider doing that. Please! Thanks, I hope you will consider giving your support to this special dx9 reinstatement crusade thread. Just post 'I'm with h2h' or something to express your support. That'll be grand many thanks
I think you didn't get that we were having poor performance in Dx11 because S397 tried to keep the backward compatibility with Dx9. The huge performance boost that many people got from the latest build is coming from focusing on Dx11 only and dropping Dx9. No more compromise that were holding back: I guess the elements that Dx9 required have been removed, it is not as simple as changing a version number… So no way back here, you better get use to it! That said, I'm as impatient as you to get all the goodies announced so long ago… But we have to keep the faith and be patient; it is clearly moving in the right direction, and at one point everything will unfold properly...
But now you have your dx11 performance update build, that will be unaffected you will still have that. And future dx11 dev will be unaffected. I'm not suggesting everybody go back to 1109! Just to be allowed to keep a dx9 option based on the final 1109-dx9 build in betas. No bug fixes required even.
I think @hardtohandle means that the server should allow for the current DX11 version or 1109-dx9. Racers choose which client version of rF2 they want to use. I'd be surprised if there is much difference in the data transferred between server and client between different versions of the game, is it anything other than position and velocity?
On one hand, it's understandable to ask for DX9 to be kept. rFactor had DX7, 8 and 9 and was working fine. On the other hand, 6 years after release, including 1 year and a half with Saviour397, rF2 is still plagued with various issues. They can't get one DX version right, let alone two.
@Seven Smiles On the contrary, since 1108 we've been getting multiple builds using the same build number because it reflects multiplayer compatibility. Therefore 1110 is explicitly incompatible with 1109, otherwise the build number wouldn't have changed. While this doesn't necessarily indicate an actual physics change (but it could!), it does mean that keeping dx9 compatible would require maintaining it completely separately to dx11 in order to maintain compatibility. I'm sure everyone would love overall progress to be slowed so that some people can keep using overlays between now and when the new UI system is in place. @hardtohandle Dx11 doesn't stop anyone drawing on it. Do some googling, people have been making overlays for dx11 games for years already. We're back to where we were initially with rF2. People can make drawing plugins if they really want, or they can wait for S397 to provide the new system we'll all end up using anyway.
Well if your right about that lazza then yes, that is pretty much the end of the road. I'm certainly not asking for s397 make a serious effort to keep dx9. I was hoping they could pretty much just patch the build number just so we can join 1110 servers. So it depends on the complexity of that. Yes of course, if they changed the server a lot for 1110, that's a lot of work to do retrospectively indeed and silly, I am not expecting them to do that. But is it really that complicated? Is the netcode really substantially different in dx11 1110 build? Only the devs know. Mostly/completely bug fixes and dx11 performance in 1110, its not like the cars go any slower in 1110. Re dx stuff, yes I'm looking at it actually. I'm not so sure it is so simple to do a dx11 overlay, in full screen and with good performance. But I know very little atm.
I doubt the build number was changed without a reason, but even you somehow could just "hack" the number for this release, later releases would at some point stop working when they add new online stuff (or also if they make any physics change, imagine if you could join a server online both with old physics and new physics...). So it's just a battle against time.
SimHub replaces trackmap. Leagues are already using their own TV overlays, like VEC. No argument to keep dx9 active. New UI will give us all these things out of the box.
I do a lot of broadcasting and have found it to be quite difficult to get ANY of the leagues using DX11 TV overlays to share. I'd like to create my own design, but I can't code. It's a shame. It seems to me that Studio 397 would want these TV overlays out, which enables leagues to broadcast the great racing in RF2...and PROMOTE their game (thus sell more copies). As a temporary (distant 2nd) "fix", you can use SimHub to create your own widgets (or you can use the few that have been created). HOWEVER... SimHub only works in player mode, not spectator mode. Anyway... contact me here, if you have a solution! Our league is seriously considering not upgrading until a solution is found. You can view my broadcasts on YouTube at the TurnLeft TV channel. The overlays you see here are DX9.
