Am Freitag, 4. Januar 2008 17:00:46 schrieb tony.wasserka@freenet.de:
Oh well, I didn't think about that, sorry. Then it of course is a good thing if we implement our own d3dx.
The directx license as far as I understand it, allows installing and using the dx runtime, which d3dx* is a part of, on Wine, even if the user does not have a Windows license. However, it does not allow shipping the DLLs with any application that it intended to run on non-windows platforms. So we need the d3dx DLLs if anyone wants to port an app that uses them using Wine.
Appart of that, there's a usability argument. Since Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista ship many of those DLLs, apps forget to ship them. Even if apps ship the dx runtime, there are some tricks needed to install it. Just having the DLLs available helps the usability of Wine.
Would we implement e.g. a BMP file loader ourselves or would we use a 3rd party library for that? Are there any patents regarding the DX specific file formats (.x/.dds)
just fyi, at least the .dds file format is well documented. I don't know about .x, but I think it is just plain text as well. Applications like kuickshow(the kde image viewer) have an implementation for it, and I think Gimp supports it as well. DXTn makes problems, especially writing DXTn images, but we can maybe use the Nvidia texture tools(MIT license) to solve both technical and legal problems.