Would this be possible? Porting Thief to DX11

Niborius on 5/8/2015 at 15:02

For my other favorite game Gothic 2, a fan-made patch has been released recently that upgrades the games' direct X to D3D11 (DirectX 11). I asked him if it's hard and how he did it, and he replied with the following:

Well, depends on the engine. The nice thing about Gothics engine is that the .exe comes with some debug information, which made it far easier to have such things as extended scripting, multiplayer or the new renderer.
Then again, neither of those are easy to archive and some are only possible because one of the former devs of the game helped a lot with the reverse engineering of the games .exe.

Upgrading just the used D3D-Version is easier than what I did, since you can write a generic wrapper for the game, which also is what I did at first. That won't bring any effects or visual enhancements, though, as it only proxies the games calls to the D3D-API to a newer version. Doing anything more than a few post process effects is hard with that, which is why I almost completely replaced the games rendering code. Doing that without any kind of debugging-info in the gamefiles should be pretty hard, but possible.

So what does the Thief .exe look like? Has anyone made an attempt to try this before? Doesn't NewDark move Thief to a newer D3D wrapper as well?

Edit: Here's a video showing the difference between Gothic 2's DX8 and DX11 [video=youtube;qFhdkLOg6WY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFhdkLOg6WY[/video] and then it's even without any texture\extended graphic mods.

ZylonBane on 5/8/2015 at 15:21

NewDark already upgrades Thief from DX6 to DX9. That's not big enough for ya?

AntiMatter_16 on 5/8/2015 at 19:33

DX11-DX8 == DX9-DX6
...Right? ;)

All things are possible, but not equally probable. Someone who's highly skilled would have to spend a lot of time hacking through Newdark's exe, since the Raven hasn't released the source with it. And it would have to be updated if Newdark gets another update.

I always hoped Newdark would get a water shader, but that hasn't happened, sadly. It certainly has lots of other goodies though. =)

Niborius on 5/8/2015 at 21:19

Quote Posted by AntiMatter_16

I didn't know that Newdark upgraded the engine all the way to DX9. That's pretty cool. Understandable too, because only the more recent cards make use of DX11.

PinkDot on 5/8/2015 at 22:19

There's much more that could be achieved with DX9 - pixel shader among others. Normal mapping and better lighting would be possible. Dynamic shadows cast by characters and such. I don't think we would need to go as far as DX11. A lot of features would never really be used, like tesselation. Who would make all the high res models? Even getting the normal maps for the textures would be a pain - just see how long the high res texture replacement project is taking...
So, getting the technical side of things is one thing, and then upgrading the assets is another. DX11 on five sided, single polygon bucket models would just look ridiculous.

nbohr1more on 6/8/2015 at 02:03

Yeah, as rumor has it... Newdark is possible because of the leaked Dark Engine source code so anyone with said code
could use it to radically upgrade NewDark. Although DDFix wasn't too shabby at wrapping DX9 around old Dark anyway so
either way is probably possible.

Still, as Pinkdot mentioned, anything beyond DX9 would entail a huge asset creation project to take advantage of it.

If someone were into doing these types of engine upgrades, their efforts would be better served by working on Sneaky Upgrade (Thief DS)
or The Dark Mod where the existing asset base is suited to render improvements (see the difference between The Dark Mod 1.01 vs 2.03,
the lighting\shader improvements etc really made a big visual leap with mostly the same assets).