wine users - Nov 2009 - D3D Vertex Blending :: why has it not been implemented?

Hi guys,

I've been wondering about the status of vertex blending in Wine. Please
excuse my stumbling across terminology; I believe it requires a GL extension
called ARB_VERTEX_BLEND. Just to be sure, I'm talking about an extension
used to transform matrices, usually employed to animate models.

Alot of video cards do not have this extension and still can run vertex blend
applications in Windows. It is as if the D3D dll's take care of emulating
the extension. Stefan Dosinger seems to agree:
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2008-February/062437.html

Obviously though. when I try to run the same applications under Wine, things
aren't how they should be. There are multiple bugs filed under this problem,
but the main bug is #6955. Here's a list of affected programs:
http://appdb.winehq.org/viewbugs.php?bug_id=6955

Note that Claudio Ciccani has even written a patch for Wine 1.1.16 and 1.1.18
almost a year ago:
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6955 (scroll down to patches)


However, as an end user I'm surprised to see that vertex blending still
isn't functional in Wine. Surely I understand that developers are incredibly
busy and have more than enough to do. But this is a problem that can be easily
solved (software emulation, just like in Windows) as a patch is readily
available, and it would bring the status of at least 20 games jump from garbage
(unplayable) to at least Bronze, I'd say.

So what's the hold-up?

The discussions on the subject of implementation
(http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2008-February/062433.html and
http://www.mail-archive.com/wine-devel at winehq.org/msg51674.html ) tell me
that the Wine developers only want 'clean' code structures - as in, if a
d3d9_X.dll should emulate the blending (?) then so should we, instead of using
wined3d or other 3rd party code.  Or maybe it's about not knowing for sure
whether this is the correct algorithm.
But the current state for any application requesting vertex blending is pretty
much garbage (unless the application has it's own fallback method) - many
people would like to play games that they could if they only knew there was a
patch out there.

Am I too much of an enthusiast - to remain silent and wait?

For now, I'll gladly run Ciccani's patch (although a bit modified to fit
1.1.32). It fixes a couple of games for me. I've also read (in the How to
play EverQuest section, by Julio Fernandez
(http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=2939&iTestingId=10538))
about people changing d3dx9_30.dll on addresses 4c6f9 through 4c6fb , but
I'll stick to the patch.

 I'm sure there are good reasons for what's going on, so please
don't be offended - just enlighten me! I'm asking for it ;)

Certainly we like to offer this feature but it needs to be implemented using
shaders and not in software as the proposed patch does. We need to finish our
fixed function vertex implementation and add this to it. Nobody is working on
that at the moment.