If you go through the history of DirectX, you’ll see that there is no DirectX 4. It went from DirectX 3 straight to DirectX 5. What’s up with that?<\/p>\n
After DirectX 3 was released, development on two successor products took place simultaneously: a shorter-term release called DirectX 4 and a more substantial longer-term release called DirectX 5.<\/p>\n
But based on the feedback we were getting from the game development community, they didn’t really care about the small features in DirectX 4; what they were much more interested in were the features of DirectX 5. So it was decided to cancel DirectX 4 and roll all of its features into DirectX 5.<\/p>\n
So why wasn’t DirectX 5 renamed to DirectX 4?<\/p>\n
Because there were already hundreds upon hundreds of documents that referred to the two projects as DirectX 4 and DirectX 5. Documents that said things like “Feature XYZ will not appear until DirectX 5”. Changing the name of the projects mid-cycle was going to create even more confusion. You would end up with headlines like “Microsoft removes DirectX 5 from the table – kiss good-bye to feature XYZ” and conversations reminiscent of Who’s on First<\/a><\/i>:<\/p>\n “I have some email from you saying that feature ABC won’t be ready until DirectX 5. When do you plan on releasing DirectX 5?”<\/p>\n “We haven’t even started planning DirectX 5; we’re completely focused on DirectX 4, which we hope to have ready by late spring.”<\/p>\n “But I need feature XYZ and you said that won’t be ready until DirectX 5.”<\/p>\n “Oh, that email was written two weeks ago. Since then, DirectX 5 got renamed to DirectX 4, and DirectX 4 was cancelled.”<\/p>\n “So when I have a letter from you talking about DirectX 5, I should pretend it says DirectX 4, and when it says DirectX 4, I should pretend it says ‘a project that has since been cancelled’?”<\/p>\n “Right, but check the date at the top of the letter, because if it’s newer than last week, then when it says DirectX 4, it really means the new DirectX 4.”<\/p>\n “And what if it says DirectX 5?”<\/p>\n “Then somebody screwed up and didn’t get the memo.”<\/p>\n “Okay, thanks. Clear as mud.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Disappeared into the cracks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-40963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":" Disappeared into the cracks.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}