Theses and Dissertations Collection

Unicon is a high-level procedural programming language with built-in graphics facilities. We implement a Direct3D 11-based graphics subsystem to be used by Unicon on Windows platforms as an alternative to the existing OpenGL-based implementation. Unicon may be configured to use this subsystem at compile-time through detection of the host platform or user configuration. The existing facilities are several years old and rely on the feature set provided by OpenGL 1.2. As such, they do not make efficient use of the processing power provided by modern graphics hardware. The Direct3D-based graphics improve on the performance of the OpenGL-based graphics through the use of shaders. The performance of the new graphics subsystem is measured through benchmarks that simulate Unicon virtual environments of varying complexities. These results will help ensure Unicon's compatibility with Windows OSs. They have also lead to changes in Unicon's platform-independent set of graphics functions that improve the portability of the language.