An Open Source Direct3D 8.0 Wrapper for Open GL

Jason writes: "RealTech-VR, creators of the V3X 3D engine, also developed a Direct3D-to-OpenGL wrapper and they have now open sourced their work. They are seeking for more hackers to help porting the wrapper to Linux and MacOS. A lot of the functionality of Direct3D is already ported but it still needs quite some work. Get the scoop at OSNews."

Comments

Re:DirectX wrapping of OpenGL -- too slow?

[dair]

I've only dealt with app level code so far, but from my few perusals of the lower levels of the library and my browsings of simple directx code, it seems as if the complexity would make for pretty slow and buggy engines.

Probably not - my day job for the last 6 months was the Mac port of Black & White, and we wrote a similar D3D->GL shim for that. Mapping from one API to the other is fairly straightforward, and the most expensive part of both is simply shoving the geometry/texture data down from the app to the API (assuming you cache out redundant state changes).

It doesn't really matter if that goes down through DrawPrimitive (D3D) or glDrawElements (GL): if that's your bottleneck, the cost is pretty much the same either way.

-dair

Not much there

[gavriels]

While it sounds all nice and all, there is very very little that is actually supported in this library. Most of the Direct3D functions are simply stubs, and this library would be absolutely incapable of running anything more complex than the rotating-cube demo they have a screenshot for. They are about where we were 18-20 months ago, and this is certainly not keeping me up at nights.

-Gav

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Gavriel State
CEO & CTO
TransGaming Technologies Inc.
gav@transgaming.com