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The Crafting of Half-Life 2 - Episode Two
Now that they have some time to stop and think, the folks behind Half-Life 2: Episode Two are making the interview rounds. Halflife2.net has up a discussion with HL2 scribe Marc Laidlaw. They discuss some of the world-shaking events in this latest chapter of the game, with plenty of spoilers. (So be forewarned.) RPS, meanwhile, has an interview with project lead David Speyrer. The developer talks John Walker through the process of playtesting at Valve, what it's like to work at such a creative company, and the decisions they made regarding DX9 vs. DX10 tradeoffs during the dev process. "RPS: You chose to not use DX10 for the new games. Why was that? DS: For this set of products we decided to use some DX10 features, but not through the API itself. It's because we didn't want to be Vista only. We didn't feel there was an enough of an install base for the Orange Box launch. I'm sure we will use it - it's pretty much inevitable. But this time, things like the hardware face morphing is implemented via a back-door API. RPS: DX9 can do what DX10 offers then? DS: Yeah, but through driver-back doors. And I'm sure we'll rethink it at some point. For this roll out it was fine to do it as we did."
How many times does it need to be said...
OpenGL does NOT have the same feature set of DirectX.
yes, OpenGL contains some of the same functionality of a subset of DirectX (namely DirectX Graphics, and its Direct3D API), but DirectX is a lot more than just 3D. It contains a LOT more... In fact in order to reach the functionality of DirectX, you need to include such goodies as SDL, OpenAL, OpenGL and more than likely a bunch of others.
We won't even get into the functionality that XNA gives the developers.