siwu’s blog

DWMaxx: Back to business

It’s been a solid 3 months since I’ve last worked on DWMaxx. I am just posting this quick post to tell everyone that I’m resuming work on it. I’ve had a LOT of computer problems (my 2 computers died), and a lot of real life stuff to take care of.
Moreover, after my computer died and I pretty changed everything in it (cpu, mobo, ram), my second computer died too. Which left me unable to work on DWMaxx at all (2 computers needed, as one is for debug).
So what’s to be expected?

First of all, moving to uDWM.dll from Vista SP1. DWMaxx will be distributed with it’s own uDWM.dll because finding RVAs using a PDB download process of msdl.microsoft.com is a pain in the ass. And let’s not even talk about compiler optimizations.
Second, I’ve been trying to have 3D transformations on windows working, as well as improving stability. 3D transformations is pretty tricky: for instance, CWindow3D::ValidateVisual() forces the 3D version to be displayed ONLY when doing the minimize/maximize animations. If it finds it’s not animating, it will force the original 2D window to show and hide itself. It’s hard in the code. That’s also why Flip3D has it’s own 3D window class. But I can’t use it since the class asks for a CFlip3D object.
So what can I do? Well, do it the hard way in the MIL protocol itself.
At the moment, here’s what I have:

• Creating a new 3D object (not CWindow3D)
• Tying it to the original 2D CVisual Window
• Creating the 3D viewport
• Setting the 3D viewport view matrices

What’s missing is the command to tell MIL to display the viewport. And of course everytime I test I have to restart the DWM because it crashes (hence the 2nd computer).
Anyway, I’ll keep you guys informed of how everything falls into place, and release a DWMaxx demo pretty soon.