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Why not use OpenGL? Why there are many Direct3D powered games? I heard that OpenGL can do everything what Direct3D do. But Direct3D are only for Micro$oft, so why they didn't use OpenGL for the additional cross platform feature. If you want to program in windows only, the cross platform feature will not really hurt in your project so why use Direct3D?
Going by what I've read here the main reasons you may choose Direct3D over OpenGL are:
Direct3D has a better API and documentation
There are less conflicts and bugs due to reduced scope of hardware
There are more, but I can't remember them right now.
But that doesn't mean that it is better than OpenGL, or vice versa - horses for courses indeed.
Microsoft has terrible support for OpenGL. It's drivers let games run @ about 3 FPS, so everyone will use Direct3D instead. But you can install the newer drivers and another OpenGL implementation.
BTW: OpenGL has also its benefits:
Cross-Platform
(IMO) much better programming style, much easier to write and understand
SDL or GLUT take care of windows creation etc.
Most modern games are made in C++, and the graphics API is abstracted such that the developer can choose between OpenGL or DirectX (and, quite often among various versions of each, including OpenGLES) at compile time, very rarely also at runtime. Most of the game's application level coding does not directly consider what backend API is used, and it really shouldn't. Portability is all too important, but you don't gain portability just by using OpenGL - the various releases going forward impose incompatibilities between versions, both for DirectX and OpenGL, and likely will again in the future.
As such, most competent engineers choose to abstract so as to remain flexible.
Good question - I use linux.
I imagine they could also kill you with a slide rule from a hundred yards ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by JVene
Microsoft hasn't made DirectX cross-platform 'cause they like laughing at you peeps who whine about it (this is prolly not true, but you don't need to know more)
Also, as long as this rubbish propaganda that Microsoft are more money grubbers than other buisness' goes on, there won't be any progress on Microsoft's motivation to go cross-platform.
My advice. Stop whining about it and go for what you want. And do NEVER tell someone that he/she is wrong for going for what he/she likes/wants/loves...
I don't blame Microsoft. Anyone wants to make money. So why would they worry about portability except between Vista/XP?
..and XboxQuote:
So why would they worry about portability except between Vista/XP?
Your right, they don't.
MS has a history of developing exclusivity with a business goal. They're worked themselves into a bind with XP ( what else did we really need unless they kill it to make us buy something else? ).
So, and this is to your point about Vista/XP - they cropped DirectX at version 9 on XP, making sure the 'latest and greatest' also requires their newer OS.
It is in the interest of developers to incorporate portability in their designs, and in all our interests that applications of all types are available on multiple platforms. Our choices are limited otherwise.
And that wraps to the original inquiry, why develop in DirectX at all?
Well, there are some features that may be useful, and certainly there is potential for enhanced performance on Windows targets. OpenGL 3.0 isn't quite out in the field yet, but it may 'strike back' at the feature set differences, and it is in Apple's interest for that to grow (Apple may release a console soon, and that will be OpenGL).
Right. Why did they develop DirectX when there is OpenGL? Or is DirectX older?
I don't recall precisely, but I think OpenGL is older.
They made DirectX for their own proprietary business reasons, and to open the potential of providing features not available in OpenGL. OpenGL was originally developed for workstation interfaces (professional applications), DirectX was originally developed for consumer oriented graphics (games for example) - the two have overlapped since their creation and are increasing in parity all the time.
I don't know the history behind this particular issue, but it's nothing new that MS tries to make up "standards" that do the same thing as existing standards, or purposely make their products not standard compliant. Both to achieve vendor lock-in.Quote:
Right. Why did they develop DirectX when there is OpenGL? Or is DirectX older?
A few examples -
Silverlight - what's wrong with Flash and Java? well, I guess the problem, for M$, is that they have pretty good cross-platform support.
J++ - slightly modified Java that runs only on Windows. Good thing Sun won the lawsuit and killed it.
IE - it claims to adhere to XHTML and CSS standards, yet interpreting many things incorrectly (and many aren't fixed for a few releases... I smell conspiracy) and omits support for many standard features, while adding their own "extensions". An unsuspecting newbie web developer testing with IE will probably end up with a site that only works in IE, which is obviously M$'s goal (they might even think it's not big deal since IE had >95% marketshare). Fortunately we don't get many sites like that nowadays, since Firefox has won significant marketshare now that web developers can no longer ignore it (and other standard-compliant browsers).
OpenDocument - Microsoft Office 2007 will support OpenDocument, yet, they managed to create an implementation that isn't compatible with ANY other existing implementation. Come on, they GOT to be TRYING. (An Antic Disposition: Update on ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace...guish#Examples
Whether this practice is fair or not is up to interpretation. I personally believe this is a very dirty business tactic.
There are cleaner ways to make money. They could have actually made better products than their competitors, and make people voluntarily use their products, instead of FORCING people to pay arms and legs to use their inferior products with their power of monoply.
The list goes on and on...
Basicly, OpenGL is better for movies and such, and DirectX is better for games, or so does wikipedia say...
Also, OpenGL was before DirectX and was developed by some company which name I have forgotten, still, DirectX had no chance against OpenGL, just like Windows had no chance against whatever people used back then (again forgot names) but still, Windows and DirectX are no most popular, well Windows is, DirectX can be debated about...
Now, the reason DirectX 10 didn't come for XP was because DirectX 10 was built for the Vista architecture, or so I heard. Just like DirectX 9 has too seperate version, or many but I'm talking about DirectX9 and DirectX 9 Vista ;)
DirectX 11 is the Windows 7 DirectX and I believe Win7 will get just as popular of not more popular than WinXP, as it's faster ( at some areas ) and not slower at any areas (can be debated), so if you want to go for DirectX, I'd say choose eather DirectX 9 or if you want to take the long shot, go for DirectX 11 ;)
This has been the problem since Unix split into several commercial versions in the late 70's.Quote:
I'd say choose eather DirectX 9 or if you want to take the long shot, go for DirectX 11
There's the current version, the next version and the previous version that 60% are still using. It doesn't matter what tech you're talking about, that 3 part division is always there, and is the reason no good engineer and businessman (combination) would choose to devote application code to a particular path, if it can be avoided.
Portability is also about portability among versions, and that's best achieved through indirection - abstraction.
These 'why use X' threads really belong on the GD forum. Unless I see some specific game programming question in the next few posts I will be moving it there.
There is definitely a big difference between the insight and practices that made MS a giant and the insight and practices that are apparently supposed to maintain this dominance. In the first case, a great thing that revolutionized the industry (one might almost say made it possible).Quote:
Originally Posted by cyberfish
In the second, totally the opposite. I strongly believe in dialectics, but "MS vs the world" is an extreme perversion of the principle which probably has not benefited anyone at all, esp. users. Or maybe that is what dialectics is supposed to be...hmmm.
Because flash is a power-sucking disguting API?Quote:
Originally Posted by cyberfish
As someone once said:
"I reject Flash and substitute my own."
(Well, not really, but close enough.)
We need something that doesn't kill the cpu or today's weak netbooks. Flash isn't the answer. That unoptimized piece of crap should be killed.
If Microsoft can succeed with Silverlight, then I applaud them.
This is true. They leveraged the power of the new OS to make a new, better, faster DX version, which ultimately led to that they couldn't backport it to XP. But they made that decision on purpose, to solely target Vista in the first place.Quote:
Originally Posted by Akkernight
DX11 will come out for Vista too.Quote:
DirectX 11 is the Windows 7 DirectX and I believe Win7 will get just as popular of not more popular than WinXP, as it's faster ( at some areas ) and not slower at any areas (can be debated), so if you want to go for DirectX, I'd say choose eather DirectX 9 or if you want to take the long shot, go for DirectX 11 ;)
If I was asked which DX version to target, I would say DX11, because let's face it - XP will be phased out whether we want it or not and what good is developing for an OS that is no longer maintained or supported?
It is likely Win7 will be the new XP anyway.
And as for OGL vs DX...
Currently, OGL is in a state of mess, I believe. Version 2 was supposed to fix that (or was it another version?), but it didn't really deliver on its promise. Let's hope the next version will deliver.
OpenGL is quite old now compared to DirectX which has received several revisions while OpenGL has just gotten one, and a bad one at that.
Currently, I believe DirectX has better graphics functionality that is also easier utilized then OpenGL.
However, as people have stated, it's apples vs oranges mostly - use what you think suits you best.
I like openGL, but as soon as you want to do something more advance you need to load a lot of extensions and make sure they work, which I think is messy...
I have been using Flash quite a bit, and I find nothing wrong with it.Quote:
We need something that doesn't kill the cpu or today's weak netbooks. Flash isn't the answer. That unoptimized piece of crap should be killed.
Flash is not meant for heavy calculations. That's what Java is for.
ActionScript 3 even includes support for hardware acceleration (DX and OGL).
I do not - Linux - Flash at least works, for ~98% of Flash apps (iMeem is the only non functional app I know of.). Silverlight is guarenteed not to.Quote:
Originally Posted by Elysia
Witness -- so here we go again: something that could advance the world of computing for everyone, but will be held up (as Adobe and Microsoft in fact are*) because the code is a secret! Meaning: reverse engineer the obvious. Meaning: the total opposite of "efficient use of resources".Quote:
Originally Posted by Cactus_Hugger
*having only the appearance of greatness. If they went open source, the products would be better! If they had done it ten years ago, we would be ten years into the future right now!
The short answer is Microsoft recommends using DirectX on their operating system, so the majority of professional Windows developers use DirectX. In doing so, they have the support of Microsoft and better stability. Actually, this is probably the long answer too.
Always use the APIs that your target platform recommends. If Apple says use OpenGL, then you wouldn't choose DirectX. True, on Windows there are options, but you will most likely have better tools, apis, etc. that come with your target platform. Previously developers chose not to use OpenGL because of driver issues. But even today, as we see with Intel's integrated graphics cards, they are often behind on OpenGL versions. NVidia and ATI tend to keep up well.
For your education though, use both APIs with Windows and let your user choose which one to run. Of course, select a default rendering library. World of Warcraft defaults to Direct3D but the user can change it to OpenGL. They will run whichever runs better on the given machine.
The problem is that it sucks up CPU like crazy.Quote:
Originally Posted by cyberfish
Just try visiting a website with flash on a netbook. It will likely eat up 50% CPU (on HyperThreading, that means the one single core).
Thus, Flash = fail.
It simply is not acceptable. We need something akin to C++ for the web - something that's FAST and modern.
What is this not guaranteed to work?Quote:
Originally Posted by Cactus_Hugger
Flash works, but does not necessarily work well.
Flash is used as a media player very often too, and even on a computer with 2 x 2 GHz, it's impossible to event watch a 480p H264 movie, while it takes less than 10% with a proper desktop DirectShow Application.
And it sucks up cpu like crazy for harmless animations!
Maybe on windows it does ;) I wonder why they would want that?Quote:
Originally Posted by Elysia
I have no particular love or hate of flash, but out of curiousity I just started googling around (because I always run a CPU monitor and I've never noticed any web stuff causing an issue).
With my (2x2GHz) computer I am unable to find *anything* flash that gets even a single CPU much over 5-10%. This page has six separate animations up to 400px wide and I'm looking at 4% and 8%. Maybe you have a better example?
So the idea that it "it sucks up cpu like crazy for harmless animations!" is just complete out-to-lunch. Maybe you need to clean your registry or something ;) Or you are just spreading some bogus hype.
There are a lot of reasons to criticise adobe; I don't think functionality is one of them.
[edit] okay, I found a big "H264" video with sound and it is 30% and 45%. That doesn't seem so bad. That is pretty high quality stuff. I don't think it's fair to contrast it to a dedicated desktop app.
They don't appear flashy enough at that page...
But I know, for example, a software that actually uses flash internally for animations - and guess what? It eats up 50% CPU for very, very simple animations (like water flowing into a tank).
It all depends on where and what, I guess.
I wonder if I should attempt to find a site with heavy flash?
One heavy page:
http://www.transformersmovie.com/
Site makes my browser LAG:
http://www.thefwa.com/50million/
And the same site with the same functionality doesn't in Silverlight?Quote:
The problem is that it sucks up CPU like crazy.
Just try visiting a website with flash on a netbook. It will likely eat up 50% CPU (on HyperThreading, that means the one single core).
Also, even if that is the case, MS could have came up with their own better implementation of flash, instead of making a new format. There's nothing wrong with flash as a language. You are only criticising the implementation.
And last time I checked (correct me if I'm wrong), Silverlight is compiled to bytecode, making it more directly comparable to Java instead of Flash.
Since there are no specific game programming questions in this thread and because it has degenerated into a war of words over nothing I'm moving it to the tech forum with the hopes it will die a slow painful death there.
I don't know. All I said was that I don't like Flash and if someone else can pull off what Flash cannot, then power to them.Quote:
Originally Posted by cyberfish
sorry to say this... But get a better computer.
Buying the cheap stuff has it's disadvantages.
Don't be silly. There are no powerful netbooks.
And powerhouses are big, heavy and has virtually no battery life.
There is no excuse for slow software. This is a C/C++ board, after all.
Here's my CPU graph from watching the "Transformers" trailer. The drop off and spike at the end was after closing the page and firing up gimp to take the screenshot. Next I'm heading to the library to see if they have that movie on DVD...I always loved bumblebee, destruction and chicks who ride motorcycles.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bubba
2x2.2 GHz pentium, flash/firefox in FC10-64bit
But there are powerful desktops and high bandwidth connections :).
I was just googling about Flash vs Silverlight. Silverlight DOES have some advantages (sadly, speed is NOT one of them) - native UI components, hardware acceleration (flash 9 added hardware acceleration support, too, though), time-based animation with automatic calculation of intermediate frames (but flash does this for you, too, with motion tweening. the point is Silverlight does it at run-time, Flash at "compile"-time), easier TrueType fonts managing, and support for .Net languages.
On the Flash side, we have network capabilities (not sure if Silverlight still doesn't have it in the latest version), smaller file size, image processing support (glow, shadow, etc), convenient .swf packaging.
Not many people compared them in terms of speed (there are some assertions that they are pretty even), but AS3 is reportedly much faster than the currently more common AS2.
I think they are pretty even in terms of feature-set (would be sad if Silverlight is worse. M$ released it years after Flash, and can copy everything Flash has). Nothing too extraordinary, though. Certainly not worth it when Flash's wide adoption and multi-platform support is taken into account.
When I think of 'speed' neither Flash nor Silverlight are first and foremost on my mind.
And kept their language proprietary. Sun's original goals were to produce a bytecode processor for their workstations to run Java programs much faster than the interpreter, creating the ultimate in vendor lock-in.Quote:
Originally Posted by cyberfish
Sun wanted to rule the computing world, too. They just failed. And maybe they should have let J++ live. Could it have been worse for them than C# has been?
Sun's reference implementation (JDK + JRE) has been made GPL last time I checked.
I fail to see how the language is proprietary. There are a few other implementations, too - gcj + GNU Classpath, IBM's implementation, etc.
They only hunted Microsoft down because, quoting Wikipedia
.Quote:
Sun's trademark license for usage of the Java brand insists that all implementations be "compatible".
Which I think is fair. Microsoft can't just make a non-compatible implementation, and call it Java as well, which is exactly what they did.
They GPL'd it in November of 2006, long after their attempts to dominate the industry failed.
The language, as far as I can remember, has always been free, though. People could make their own implementations, as long as they are compatible with the official implementation.
I don't see anything wrong with it, as long as other people are free to make such a hardware, too. And then there are dynamic recompilers (other people could have created them if Sun didn't) that make Java run almost as fast as native code.Quote:
Sun's original goals were to produce a bytecode processor for their workstations to run Java programs much faster than the interpreter, creating the ultimate in vendor lock-in.
But the corporation still owns the language specification, no? Or at least did for most of its lifetime?
Which is fine...free market and all. But I still consider it proprietary technology. Their hype and C++ FUD in the 90s was vomit-inducing, too, so I'm probably biased. :-)
You can modify the language all you want, as long as you don't call it Java.
I don't think Microsoft can call the next Windows version Linux 8, either, even if they wanted to. Is Linux not free?...
That wasn't the point. I'd rather see a language owned by a group of individuals who aren't driven by the whims of a particular corporation. Java goes as Sun wants it to, C# as MS wants, etc.
Haha I see what you mean.
Does such a language exist?
Quote:
Originally Posted by cyberfish
C and C++ for starters.
Which sun now ships most of their units running windows, tho (at least, I was at a web 2.0 tradeshow* last year and when I wandered into the sun tent to have a gander at $20 G server systems, I was shocked to notice they were all running NT or whatever -- not solaris).Quote:
Originally Posted by medievalelks
Also the java "portability" idea is great but evidently has gotten hamstrung somewhere. A little while ago I wanted to install "azureus", which requires some of the sun development library. I could not get either of these things to install on Fedora Core 10-64bit -- so probably neither can 80-95% of the linux user base.
*FYI if you put a project up at sourceforge they will invite you for free to stuff like that at the last minute. The only other thing you need is a business card with your name on it...