i'd like to add that shaders still arnt working properly in winXP with 2008 - sorry :/
ALOT more is working than it was! Which is great
But after spending a frustrating 4 hours with my project I find so much that still isnt working.
No normal mapping or bump shaders are working for me. They either make the object disapear or cause an assertion failure. Mike: the CRT is during a MEMCPY and its trying to copy a string containing "indices".
Texture stages still arnt working properly either. I've tripple checked. The FVF is correct (dbConvertObjectFVF(nWorldObjectID, FVF_XYZ | FVF_NORMAL | FVF_TEX3)
and texturing stage 0 is fine. Texture stage 1 after that though and the whole object takes on the diffuse colour relavent to what you just tried to texture (like, i tried to apply an ice texture to stage 1 and the whole cube turned blue) - possiably suggesting the U/V's arnt right for stage 1 but...
if you expose the blend function (void SetBlendMap ( int iID, int iStage, int iImage, int iTexCoordMode, int iMode )
and set blend maps for stage 1 and 2 they appear perfect and correct and the blend map is u/ved properly.
Only reason i bring up the texture stage thing is i'm wondering if bump mapping etc trouble is PARTLY caused by texture stages SEEMINGLY being bjorked when these shaders rely on texture data from multiple stages.
Hope you get this fixed mike, its really important to get shaders working well in this thing, especially with darkshader :/
EDIT:
Mike: it would really help us to help you debug this stuff and provide you with better information if you would knock us up a char *GetLastShaderError(); and just throw some quick lines into the library to set a string with the last error a shader related command thew. like couldnt load file, couldnt parse file, couldnt execute effect, tried to apply to nonexistant object, tried to use nonexistant image.. etc. Should make your work alot easier if you could do that!
