Oh, and if I'm so wrong then why have you not pointed out one specific thing? If I'm so wrong why are you posting anonymously and only uttering a short sentence to mock me? Come up with some real points before you open your mouth, I wasn't being hostile and there's no reason you should respond in such a way, unless you feel like calling people names makes you a bigger person.
The issue isn't really even that DirectX is good or not at this point so much, it's that the entire game engine has been written using it and only it. The original half-life could be ported since it had an OpenGL renderer. However the entire half-life 2 engine would more then likely have to be re-written to work on Linux. It can work on the Xbox since it uses a slightly modified DirectX version.
For those commenting about the SDL, I don't remember exactly but isn't it software only? I'm currently unaware of any unified hardware library that'd work on all distros of linux.
As well there's the fact that really the only competition for DirectX is OpenGL and they need to hurry their asses up with the 2.0 specification if they expect to be around much longer and considered seriously by most gamers.
So half-life 2 was not ported more then likely because it was written with a windows only hardware based API, why? because it was the best possible way at the time to write software that would have the primary purpose of running on windows, which is the operating system over 90% of people use. Microsoft offered a nice and tidy solution.
If Valve were as crazy as the folks at iD, then maybe they'd have thrown together ten different APIs haphazardly and used OpenGL's vendor specific extensions to make HL2, but it would've taken much longer, and while it could then be ported to other OSes, it's questionable that it would have looked as good. The game will probably never be ported by valve themself, because it would require almost an entire game re-write and definitely a new renderer from scratch at the least, new shaders, etc.
That's not to say it couldn't be done, but quite honestly, from a standpoint of any sane businessman, why would you do that to appease a small portion of the 4 or 5% of people that use Linux as a desktop OS? Carmack, he's crazy, he doesn't even understand the necessity of a use key in an FPS.
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Oh, and if I'm so wrong then why have you not pointed out one specific thing? If I'm so wrong why are you posting anonymously and only uttering a short sentence to mock me? Come up with some real points before you open your mouth, I wasn't being hostile and there's no reason you should respond in such a way, unless you feel like calling people names makes you a bigger person.
The issue isn't really even that DirectX is good or not at this point so much, it's that the entire game engine has been written using it and only it. The original half-life could be ported since it had an OpenGL renderer. However the entire half-life 2 engine would more then likely have to be re-written to work on Linux. It can work on the Xbox since it uses a slightly modified DirectX version.
For those commenting about the SDL, I don't remember exactly but isn't it software only? I'm currently unaware of any unified hardware library that'd work on all distros of linux.
As well there's the fact that really the only competition for DirectX is OpenGL and they need to hurry their asses up with the 2.0 specification if they expect to be around much longer and considered seriously by most gamers.
So half-life 2 was not ported more then likely because it was written with a windows only hardware based API, why? because it was the best possible way at the time to write software that would have the primary purpose of running on windows, which is the operating system over 90% of people use. Microsoft offered a nice and tidy solution.
If Valve were as crazy as the folks at iD, then maybe they'd have thrown together ten different APIs haphazardly and used OpenGL's vendor specific extensions to make HL2, but it would've taken much longer, and while it could then be ported to other OSes, it's questionable that it would have looked as good. The game will probably never be ported by valve themself, because it would require almost an entire game re-write and definitely a new renderer from scratch at the least, new shaders, etc.
That's not to say it couldn't be done, but quite honestly, from a standpoint of any sane businessman, why would you do that to appease a small portion of the 4 or 5% of people that use Linux as a desktop OS? Carmack, he's crazy, he doesn't even understand the necessity of a use key in an FPS.