Thread: Rendering into multiple windows

For my editor I'm wanting to render a main view and then some simple tile selection views. The tile selections will be part of a CPropertyPage in MFC that has a CWnd with a IDirect3DSwapChain9 interface pointer in it.

For each window do I have to CreateAdditionalSwapChain() and then call IDirect3DSwapChain9::Present() for each window?

In essence my render would look like this in CEditor3D, which is the main class where everything happens.

CEditorView::OnDraw() calls virtual CEditor3D::Render() which looks like this:

Code:

void CEditor3D::Render(float fTimeDelta)
{
  //Render main view using D3DPRESENT_PARAMETERS
     m_pDevice->Clear(0,0,D3DCLEAR_TARGET | D3DCLEAR_ZBUFFER,0,1.0f,0);

  m_pDevice->BeginScene();
  ....
  m_pDevice->EndScene();
  m_pDevice->Present(0,0,0,0);

  //Render all windows
  LPDIRECT3DSURFACE9 pBackBuffer=NULL;
  
for (unsigned int i=0;i<m_vWindowList.size();i++)
  {
     m_vWindowList[i]->m_pSwapChain->GetBackBuffer(0,D3DBACKBUFFERTYPE_MONO,&pBackBuffer);
     m_pDevice->SetRenderTarget(0,pBackBuffer);
     m_pDevice->Clear(0,0,D3DCLEAR_TARGET | D3DCLEAR_ZBUFFER,0,1.0f,0);

     m_pDevice->BeginScene();
     ...
     m_vWindowList[i]->Render(fTimeDelta);
     ...
     m_pDevice->EndScene();
     m_vWindowList[i]->m_pSwapChain->Present(0,0,m_vWindowList[i].m_hwnd,0,0);
  
    pBackBuffer->Release();

 }
}

Is this the correct way?

This is confusing but there isn't any message loop for the Direct3D window. When I initialize my Direct3D I specify that it is windowed and that it does not need to create a window. It just uses the one I supply. So essentially it's just a render window with no associated message loop. The message loop is inside of MFC's doc/view architecture and inside of that I can fire off a thread that is solely responsible for calling CEditor3D::Render().
But for now it's only updated when MFC calls CView::OnDraw() which works just fine.

For those of you who know what I'm talking about...does this seem like a logical way to render to multiple MFC windows (CPropertyPages) as well as one main CView?

This is an SDI app.

I've never used MFC, but that's basically how I do it. I only call GetBackBuffer once though (or when the window is resized so it has to be reset). Also, you may need a separate Z-buffer for each swap chain using CreateDepthStencilSurface() and SetDepthStencilSurface(), I got some might odd bugs when using the same for all my windows.

Oh, and I usually use an invisible dummy window as the main render target so all my windows use the same swap-chaining code. Not an elegant solution perhaps, but it works...