Author Topic: Working Information Panels at KORD v2  (Read 1793 times)

Erwin06

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Working Information Panels at KORD v2
« on: April 17, 2022, 12:45:05 pm »
Hi,

I have recently bought KORD v2 for P3Dv5 (waiting for the MSFS platform to be more stable...).
I was at first surprised that the Working AI Panels weren't operational and then I read multiple Topics on this forum and this one from Virtuali from April 08, 2020 : http://www.fsdreamteam.com/forum/index.php/topic,23304.0.html.

It's been two years now, is-it still planned in a future update to make RTT available for DirectX12 ?

Thanks !

virtuali

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Re: Working Information Panels at KORD v2
« Reply #1 on: April 17, 2022, 11:58:05 pm »
It's been two years now, is-it still planned in a future update to make RTT available for DirectX12 ?

It's not as we have been silent for two years about this. Quite the opposite, in fact, see here many posts which are not so old, which clarified the issues were were facing:

http://www.fsdreamteam.com/forum/index.php/topic,25549.0.html
http://www.fsdreamteam.com/forum/index.php/topic,25391.msg167236.html#msg167236
http://www.fsdreamteam.com/forum/index.php/topic,25742.msg169084.html#msg169084

We did what we could, and made a free update specific to P3D V5 to restore multi-liveries for all operators, and added about 200 extra operators to satisfy what most users really needed RTT for ( custom operators ), but unfortunately there's no way to restore the full RTT functionality because:

- We used DirectX 11 directly, and DirectX 12 is very different and it's a whole different level of complexity, and even LM ( who made the sim ) struggled a lot with reliability ( DXGI errors ) since V5 came out, so we aren't really confident of doing something that might potentially crash the video driver, because memory handling would fall back into our responsibility, instead of the video driver itself, and we don't have an army of programmers that know their own hardware inside and out, like nVidia/AMD have, whose only job is to make drivers crash proof. With DX12, if you screw up memory management ( which was made by the driver itself in DX11 ), it's all your fault...

- Other than for custom operators ( which is less hardly required now, considering how many we added in the meantime ), the main feature we used RTT in P3D V4 was Dynamic Text rendering. But as explained in one of the linked thread above, the basic API we required ( DirectWrite ) is no longer there in DX12, and it would require a very complex and memory consuming hybrid rendering of DX11+DX12 on the same device, something that even LM decided not to do, because at some time they tried to support Windows 7 ( which doesn't have DX12 ), but it was dropped during the Beta.  And, we used a 3rd party Open Source library to do Font rendering, and that only supports DX11, because Font rendering in DX12 is extremely hard.

- MSFS came out, and MS/Asobo confirmed they don't have any plans for any kind of RTT. We couldn't possibly continue to support P3D, if we had to support so many different methods of doing multi-liveries  ( standard Multi-liveries in FSX and P3D1/2/3, DX11 in P3D4, DX12 in P3D5, standard multi-liveries in MSFS ) and, since multi-liveries are supported in P3D5 and all other older simulators as well, the only possible choice was to just leave DX11 as it was, as a P3D4 specialty feature, and keep using multi-liveries, which work both in P3D5 and MSFS from now on.
« Last Edit: April 17, 2022, 11:59:39 pm by virtuali »