I'm (possibly) looking for a good software rendering solution that doesn't cost 10K (like pixomatic, which sounds perfect), and can render to a windowed app (without asking the user to change their bit depth).

So far I know of FastGraph, but I've heard mixed reviews (I've still to do my own testing though). Are there any other reliable software renderers out there that don't cost a fortune?

you should write Rad Gametools and see if you can work something out, explain your situation.... it's worth a shot

Originally posted by Dan MacDonald
you should write Rad Gametools and see if you can work something out, explain your situation.... it's worth a shot

I don't think I can do that though given my real job, but it is a good suggestion. ;)

Maybe the indie community "at large" could convince these guys to offer a shareware license with (very) limited support?

Excuse my ignorance, but why do you wanna do something like that? 3D acceleration is available for about 7 years. You don't even have perspective correction in software rendering. It looks poor and outdated and it's very very slow (sw rendering wasn't even good enough for *gasp* daikatana). For the throughput of a P200+voodoo you'll need more than 1ghz and it will look worse.

Seriously, who has such a cpu and hasn't a graphics card with some basic 3d support *and* wants to play 3d games? 0.01%? Is that worth it?

Well, I'm just wondering what your reasons might be.

My player support data tells me that there are >1GHz systems sold today that don't include hardware accelerated 3D. I'm still planning on supporting software only once I get around to it .. :)

Mh... really?

You can't buy a pc without some kind of 3d accelerator for about 4-5 years here (Germany). Well... ok notebooks, but PCs? No.

Also checked several online shops they doesn't sell 2d cards anymore because that doesn't make any sense - you can get a cheap 3d card for about 10€ and I could get a geforce 3 ti something, a geforce2 200, a geforce 2 400 and another one for free. There is so much old hardware floating around. Heck even my mom's trash pc has a 3d accelerator.

Hm... ok after some thinking I know two people with PCs without 3d acceleration. One is a 486 and the other one is a pentium 133. Oh and my router, but then again... it doesn't have any graphics card :)

Because a software renderer will look the same on all computers and it will not be alergic to bad drivers.

Because not all games need real-time rendering, and non-real-time renderers can look massively better, and, more importantly, quite different than their RT counterparts.

An advanced software renderer would fit my needs rather nicely come to think of it.

Besides, if you want to play the hardware game, in a few years processors will be so strong that 3d cards will become history :)

I touted this engine in another thread, but the Quake1/Quake2 engines are pretty solid and free to use if you stick to the GPL ($10k otherwise). Their software renderers are pretty top-notch and ran very well on older systems. I thought the software renderer in many ways looked a lot better than the hardware renderer (something to do with how the colored lights looked in the hardware renderer).

>Besides, if you want to play the
>hardware game, in a few years
>processors will be so strong that 3d
>cards will become history :)

Hehe. Well, 3d chips have 3 to 6 times more transistors than CPUs and have direct access to ultra fast ram.

Number crunching (eg brute force password attacks) for example can be done much faster on 3d cards. And of course they are specialized on graphics stuff.

Sure CPUs are getting faster, but it will take ages until they catch up and even then you've to deal with that 3-5 year hardware lag, wich you have to take into consideration as indy. Oh and by that time you can just use a pixelshader massacre for a surreal look - 2d cards are history then.

---

On a second thought... those 2d only PCs wich showed up in that statistic contain most likely alot of PCs wich actually have 3D cards build in, but without a proper driver installed (the cursed default vga, I tell you ;)).

Pixomatic has a fairly extensive page on why they wrote a software renderer in this 3D hardware age.

http://www.radgametools.com/pixowhy.htm

You might want to look at this:

http://softwire.sourceforge.net/

It's a "run-time x86 assembler" which can be used as a "JIT compiler back-edn for scripting languages, or for dynamic code generation of optimized inner loops."

"So what does that have to do with the topic?" you ask..

Well, if you look under the "Extra" link on that page, you'll see the guy who made it used it to create a software Quake III (yeah 3, not 2 or 1) map renderer with some pretty complete features...

He also is doing a DX9 software emulator which supports ps/vs 2.0 and produces an "acceptable framerate"...

Don't know a whole lot about the licensing of his stuff, but there you have it...

Chaster

You might want to try http://www.nullsoft.com/free/plush/

It's the same 3D renderer they're using in Winamp for their credits screen.

Besides supporting D3D and OpenGL, the Irrlicht Engine also features a software renderer, though I have no experience with it and don't how well it performs.

Irrlicht Features (http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/features.html#drivers)

Softwire was interesting. Unfortunately, self-modifying code is outlawed on an AMD chip running WindowsXP SP2.

I think self modifying code on the Windows XP with SP2 may cause some bugs on some of the more advanced processors, that can be easily fixed.

That Gamasutra article about the 64-bit future is wrong.

Running code out of the heap or stack with SP2 is by default prohibited to avoid buffer overflows and similar attacks, but you can easily allocate a block of memory where you CAN write executable code, by using VirtualAlloc and passing the permit execution flag in the last parameter. This is the recommended way to generate code anyway on Windows, and it is the way used by the .NET and Java runtimes, and numerous dynamically recompiling game console emulators like Dolphin (http://www.dolphin-emu.com) .

And no, Wayward, it will not force a reboot. It will however crash the program, unless it does what I describe above.

Original post by Wayward
Just don't use self-modifying code. Who needs it anyway?

A Lisp game may download game scripts from the net and compile them at run-time.

Thanks for the suggestions. (and keep them coming)