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DirectX 10 Coming To Linux and Mac
twickline writes "Jeremy White posted the 2009 roadmap for Crossover, and wrote, 'We've just shipped a lot of those "under the hood" improvements for games out in CrossOver Games 7.2. We're really pushing Direct X 9 support pretty far along, and getting ready to move on Direct X 10. ... In addition to our normal work of broadening and deepening our application support in Wine, we're going to try to dramatically improve the CrossOver GUI itself. First, the Linux version will get a fresh new look. But both versions are going to get an interface that we hope will bring the power of the Compatibility Center right into the installation view. The key idea is to make it easier to distill the gathered wisdom on unsupported applications and make it far easier to use.'"
With Wine under the LGPL (making much of CrossOver LGPL) and CodeWeavers supporting Wine development, this will probably result in standard Wine also supporting DirectX 10 soon. I can also see this becoming a DirectX 10 to OpenGL wrapper to provide DirectX 10 features on XP. Both of these would be nice.
Surely with the likes of IBM, Apple, EA, Sun (shudder), Valve, ATI, Nvidia, all teaming up, they could create a cross platform API, and all appropriate documentation, programming plugins etc that will make programming for it easier than DirectX?
I mean, it's not the wildest concept ever. Clean up OpenGL, make it simpler if required. Add Open sound, add openinput, and voila!
If it's simple to code for, well documented and supports all of the latest features, and is downloadable as a library for all of the major windows' and *nix's it will make life easier for gamers, developers and other open source advocates.
It could be like java in concept, but more like directx in function. (ie it works)
Is this for Wine or for CrossOver? Because CrossOver isn't free, is it?
I love the Wine project.
I have seen it mature to where it is amazingly able to reproduce Windows (bugs and all!) which is NO SMALL FEAT.
I've installed Crossover Office for someone and seen it able to run Office perfectly.
I just wish in all of that it was able to run Rogue Squadron, an old Windows 98 game because that is really the only game I miss.
But I suppose Rogue Squadron is too much of an oddball; it's old and probably relies on some undocumented jazz in Windows 98...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
As much as I'd like to see *nix do better I hate openGL with a fiery passion. I'll grant that the generally lower performance and responsiveness is almost guaranteed to be the developers fault rather than opengl... but requiring me to go get a third party application purely to keep my monitor from being forced to 60hz every damn time I boot up the game pisses me off.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
but requiring me to go get a third party application purely to keep my monitor from being forced to 60hz every damn time I boot up the game pisses me off.
There are two possible reasons for this:
OpenGL does not even support switching screen modes and often relies on OS-specific mechanisms. DirectX often suffers in my experience (and based on some web searches, in many others') from similar problems and the most common X11 implementations provide screen mode switching mechanisms that are clearly independent of OpenGL and easily (in the "just write lots of numbers into a text file" sense) configured for specific monitor timings.
In conclusion, I can probably make some of the resident Linux zealots happy by saying your problems are probably with Windows, not OpenGL.
One of the interesting, but less-often mentioned, things about WINE is that it works on Windows. If WINE adds support for DirectX 10, then this makes it possible to run DirectX 10 games on Windows XP, which gives home users a reason not to upgrade to Vista / Windows 7.
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That's got nothing to do with the graphics hardware at all, it's crap programming. You can enumerate all supported display modes, and you'll generally pick either the highest one, or the current display mode (or offer a choice).
// where 2 is speed
At a guess, I'd say that the game jumping to 60Hz is due to a fixed time step being employed within the update loop of the game (in general this is because physics engines don't work very well with variable time steps). If you do this kind of thing, you have to divorce the rendering from the game update - which some people are pretty bad at doing.
This sounds like it's a case of the game develeoper trying to optimise the code in pretty crap ways such as replacing this:
position += time_delta * 2.0f;
with this:
position += 0.03333333333f;
To remove a few mults at runtime. (my opinion is that that stuff just isn't worth doing).
The reality is having a refresh greater than 60Hz is pretty pointless with an LCD because there is no phosphor being strobe blasted with scanlines where the eye can detect the flicker and most people can't detect changes faster than 1/30th of a second, much less 1/60th.
This is probably true if they're calculating motion blur, but pumping up the refresh rate is simpler. We're not talking about flicker of static images, but the stepped-motion of moving ones. An object that flies across a 1920 pixel screen in one second, shifts 32 pixels a frame at 60hz, and 16 at 120hz. These are differences you can see.
You can use 2003, the 32bit version supports more than 4gb of ram (xp could too, its artificially crippled and aparrently non service packed versions do) and the 64bit version works a lot better than xp64 ever did.
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