A9?

Sorry for create this topic on this place.
But:
When is the release date of the A9?
What features are added to the 3DGS in A9?
Is that supported DirectX11?

DirectX11? I think A9 will support DirectX13 .

Strange, I was going to ask them the same question. My understanding is Conitec tends to stay a generation behind the current version of DirectX (I read about this somewhere) so A9 will probably be DX10 compliant.

I have no idea which features A9 will contain. We'll think about that when the time has come. But I don't believe that it will have a DX10 interface - it will use the latest DX version from the time of its development.

the next Gen of game comes on 2014.
3DGS must be use DX11.

The question you (and anybody else, including me, of course) should ask yourself is if you are able to create current-gen or even previous-gen quality of games.

@Superku regardles of skills of some people here, havoing a DX11 interface just allows some great enhancements here and there.(And if done properly, even general a speedup)

REMOVED **

There is no specific date.
[irony]
But A9 is coming soon (Conitec Time)
[/irony]

Much more important than DX11 or a A9 is a better workflow of the editors (and an improved WED). With this it would be a lot easier to use the real power of DX9 and Acknex. Then A9 and DX11 can follow to improve further

YES WE CAN!!!!!

For my game-project one of the biggest problems is the sorting of semi-transparent polygons.
They are not sorted correctly in A8 (DirectX 9), and doing some workarounds to prevent this problem is very complicated and time consuming.

But DirectX 11 supports 'Order Independent Transparency'.
Therefore the problem of wrong sorted semi-transparent polygons would be solved with DirectX 11.
Look here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zANEUhyT2y8

Yes, I would like to experiment with DX11, too, but it is NOT a must for GStudio.

@Thomas: Yes, I see where this feature would come in handy for you. However, you are probably better off with using the following approach for your vegetation, especially without DX11: http://www2.disney.co.uk/cms_res/blackrockstudio/pdf/Foliage_Rendering_in_Pure.pdf
There you render the vegetation (separated from the game world) with alpha testing (thus solid and much much faster, esp. with many overlapping polygons/ models) and use an alpha mask to keep the smooth edges that you normally would lose with alpha testing alone.

Thanks, Felix, but this technique doesn't solve my problem.
I had used a similar technique some years ago, but without any shader. I used two models, which had exactly the same polygons and exactly the same position within the level. One model had a bitmap texture with overlay (alpha testing) and one had a TGA texture with an alpha-mask and soft borders. The result didn't look good, because I still had sorting problems at the edges (the soft borders were sorted in the wrong order). And this doesn't look realistic, especially when I use very detailed textures.

Hm I don't understand two things, your approach from a few years ago (but not that important when it does not work) and more important why the technique would not help in your case? I'm pretty certain that it would.
You render all the vegetation with solid faces, thus there cannot be any sorting errors. Then in a postprocessing step you add the vegetation to your game world and smoothen the edges by alpha blending using one or two alpha masks.
If it should for some reason look poorly close up you can still use regular alpha blending/ rendering for nearby models and use said technique for all other vegetation.

Harry Potter, you do understand that the Order Independant Transparency shown in that video is not a DX11 feature one can just enable, but a quite complex shader effect which takes advantage of DX11 features.
I actually didn´t read the paper in more detail than a short look, but I guess
the basic idea they use is to create a linked list for each rendered pixel with the data to blend, sorting the data by distance and then blending it together. Thanks to features of DX11 and current hardware this can all be done on the GPU at a quite good performance.
Here is the paper about it: https://graphics.stanford.edu/wikis/cs44...s-10-11-oit.pdf

And maybe this part of the discussion could make a new thread as it is quite off topic, but could make an interesting discussion?

Yes I know that it is a shader. But this shader can only be used together with DirectX 11. Therefore I wish that DX11 will be implemented in A8/A9 as soon as possible.
Thanx for the paper. It looks very interesting.

I have opened a new thread for discussions: Order Independent Transparency

@Superku: could you please post your last comments again in german language (using the new discussion thread). To avoid misunderstandings.