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OpenGL 2.0 Released
berny@work writes "OpenGL has finally released version 2.0. The benefits include Programable Shaders, in particular: Shader Objects, Shader Programs, OpenGL Shading Language and changes to the Shader API. If you are interested take a look at the tutorials and the case studies that are linked to from the OpenGL site."
Lets hope that this will encourage more developers to switch to OpenGL. Yeah, I know the argument abt Direct3D being better (and I agree with it) but the new ver of OpenGL might just be good enough and arent the game developers always on the lookout for ways to get the massive linux gamers market
Can OpenGL ever match DX in popularity among developers?
One word: portability
All I know is that this has been a long time in the coming and is great news, especially as MS has just announced the discontinuement of DX past the current version. Finally some competition to DX in modern games, however I really hope this will help people such as myself who do 3D work in Maya and such. Maya has just included a new feature that lets the viewports do a realtime high-quality openGL render as you work on your model/scene, so this can only make that faster and better (though as of right now, realistically speaking it isnt usable nor stable for actual work). Now for ATI to include serious openGL support for its cards & drivers...
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Game developers? Probably not any time soon. Developers of visualisation applications and the such? No-one seriously uses Direct3D for that.
Obviously DirectX has such things as DirectSound which don't really have alternatives under Windows, though.
While I love OpenGL far more than DX, your argument would be better served by not listing games that are all from the same company. (or at least, using engines from the same company)
That's not even close to being a good comparison. Cg is a vendor-proprietory language not a cross-vendor language. You don't see Cg for ATI cards, no do you? DirectX is a platform-specific API, not a cross-platform API. On top of that, it's optimized for gaming, not professional applications. In any case, GLSL came out last year, so at worst, you can say that OpenGL was a year behind Direct3D in getting a high-level shading language.
Personally, I've used both D3D and OpenGL, and find D3D to be a horribly designed API, with massive changes in each revision. I'd much rather get OpenGL a year later, but designed right, than the D3D hack of the day.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Still, as a former OpenGL developer I must say that while OpenGL is nice it is far from perfect.
The API is very C-centered, which is nice, if you develop in C; we however developed in other languages, which more suitable for enterprise apps where stability and floatingpoint correctes is AO.
I'm not fond of OOP, but it sure makes sense when you deal with visual objects, and OpenGL doesn't really feel OO. Dealing with OpenGL for Lisp or Python is easy, but sure as hell ain't pretty.
Are you kidding?
Come on, thats no argument. There is NO linux gamers market worth mentioning, and there is NO massive linux market in the first place.
A better argument:
OpenGL is a long standing industry standard which give developers more control over the way stuff gets rendered. Its simple, straightforward and does not depend on a large, antropophagic competitor, platform owner like Microsoft.
And THATS why ID uses it. So the MS wont choke them by controlling that critical part of the API.
Not many developers have the muscle ID has to invest in remaking a lot of stuff DX already provides, but for some sizes, its worth it.
NO SIG
Hardware tends not to be very object oriented and C++ can quite happily call C.
While I agree OO has advantages in some situations with a low level graphics API I don't think that's the case the only real omission in OpenGL caused by the C interface is function overloading for the various argument types to a few functions. That would clean up a few things.
In 3D graphics OO really kicks into it's own when it comes to higher level APIs like scene graphs and there are numerous examples. These can and do benefit greatly from OO design but nobody has come up with a compelling low level hardware interface that justified OO. Sure you could wrap a few things in a class or two but there's no compelling architectural justification and attepmts to wrap OpenGL in a trivial namespace class and call it OO are horribly naive and misguided.
Heh, spoken like someone who has never written a line of graphics code in their life. If you read Carmack's original OpenGL .plan you'll see that he was talking about how much cleaner OpenGL was to call.
You don't cite a reference w.r.t OpenGL & Carmack, it is clearly FUD. The only dissatisfaction I've seen from Carmack was in the Cg vs glslang hardware abstraction, I won't explain it, it's too technical for you but basically Carmack was advocating the futureproof open aproach and in some respects he got his way, however Doom3 calls ARBfp and ARBvp shaders anyway.
Carmack has never waivered from his OpenGL support and the only issue he's taken a public stand on in the API was as I said, shaders where he expressed a dislike for Cg and Cg is very similar to HLSL in D3D so Carmack was taking a stand against a shader approach that is used in D3D.
OpenGL has been around longer than D3D, is a lot cleaner in design, it has a clear unambiguius specification and has conformance tests to ensure quality of implementation. OpenGL is also portable to non-Windows platforms. All of these are excellent reasons to use OpenGl that have nothing to do with being non-Microsoft.
3D graphics is something that no sane developer would ever lock himself to a proprietary API like Direct3D. More and more companies use OpenGL for their games, and now with 2.0 even more will ever use it. Using OpenGL has the additional benefit of porting a game to architectures other than Windows. As for other parts of DirectX, there are various combinations that can do the job: OpenGL + SDL, OpenGL + AllegroGL + Allegro, etc.
People always post this crap and it's never a good idea.
Look, here's an example of something you CAN'T do with a boot disk game:
Bob: "Hey, Joe, let's play some Return to Castle Wolfenstein."
Joe: "Cool. Wanna do the voicecomm?"
Bob: "Sure. Let's use Roger Wilco, my IP's 127.0.0.1"
Joe: "Rock, see you there."
(Or whatever those wacky kids are using these days for voicecomm in games.)
Here's another little skit:
Joe: "I just bought a new ATIVidia SuperCard that has 20 times the performance of older cards!"
Bob: "Awesome! Boot up 'Super Linux Brothers' and let's see how it runs!"
Joe inserts Linux CD that boots into game.
Joe: "Screen's just black."
Bob: "Shit, must be missing the driver..."
Joe: "How the hell do you put a driver on a already-burnt CD?!? This game sucks!"
And here's a third:
Joe: "Here, try my copy of 'Super Linux Brothers.'"
Bob: "Ok."
Bob runs game.
Bob: "These controls are really awkward."
Joe: "I know, it took me like three hours to get controls I liked... just use my control set."
Bob: "Where is it?"
Joe: "Shit, it's saved on my HD at home! I forgot to bring it! Goddamned."
I hope I've demonstrated that having a boot disk for a game is a BAD idea, and why nobody will buy a game distributed that way. There's a reason we haven't done that since the 80s, you know.
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