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can someone please tell me
1. What is the dominant API DirectX or OpenGL, what API offers more jobs?
2. What API's are used for Playstation, Xbox and GameCube?
3. What methods to you recommend for mastering a particular API?
4. Why did Microsoft make windows so cumbersome to programme?
thanx
1. From what I've heard, DX
2. I think PS2 uses OGL, XBox uses DX, and I think Gamecube uses a propreitary (sp?) API
3. I've been learning OGL for quite some time, and the basics can be learned on the internet for free. I've never used any books for OGL yet, but I do plan on buying a 3D math book
4. Because they're M$ and they could've made the worst windowing API in the world and people would still use it.
1. There is no truly "dominant" API, but most likely you will find more jobs in DX at the moment.
2. Dunno.
3. Take it slow, make sure you know enough about the subject before moving on, and learn plently of linear algebra and 3D mathematics.
4. Opinion with thousands of answers.
1. Either, honestly neither is more advantages (ex. Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic was written in OpenGL then ported to DX)Quote:
Originally Posted by juniorCoder
2. Playstation and GameCube have their own rendering modules as far as i know. Xbox does NOT use DX, it uses DX+ or something (dont remember the exact name) its specifically for the Xbox hardware.
3. Online tutorials and books + lots of general programming practice
4. Because thats what their good at doing, and if your good at something you should stick with it.
I didn't realize this. Is there any difference code wise?Quote:
Originally Posted by Perspective
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/p...00/XBoxPR1.aspQuote:
Xbox Specification
* DirectX API
* Intel Pentium III processor technology with Streaming SIMD Extensions.
* Custom 3-D NVIDIA graphics processor
* 64 MB of RAM (unified memory architecture)
* Custom 3-D audio processor
* 8GB hard drive
* 4X DVD drive with movie playback
* Four game controller ports
* Expansion port
* Proprietary A/V connector
* 100 MBps Ethernet
It does use DirectX. It probably uses a custom implementation cause of the hardware, but it's still DirectX. Why would MS develop an entirely new interface? (it's not their style :) )
directx by far offers more jobs. it's more widely used in 3D games. I use opengl for rendering.Quote:
What is the dominant API DirectX or OpenGL, what API offers more jobs?
Why is windows so hard to program? Kind of a silly question, considering the largest system anyone on these boards has ever implemented is a relatively simple game engine. i've seen one person make an attempt at writing an operating system using assembly and C, and wasn't nearly as functional as what we use. You can't easily implement a system as large as an os and not have flaky edges
1. neither... it a deadlock currently, though at the moment Direct-X has a preference because of better shader support in HW. new cards will reverse this.
2. ps2 is the Emotion Engine it also supports OpenGL, XBox uses Direct-X also supports OpenGL, GameCube dont know... their own API.
3. read, practice.
4. to discourage independant developement of superior products... we all know MS doesnt use the WinAPI internally, thats just for us, they use some other easier API... where there arn't a billion stupid inexorable structures and functions take less that 10 parameters to call.
actually they probably have a plian english programming language by now, where i could compile this and get notepad
really crappy text editor;"BILL RULES"
for wordpad
more stable notepad featureset + 1;"BILL ROCKS"
for MSWord
wordpad++ execution speed--;"BILL IS TEH 133+35+"
edit: um for all you flame war addicts... the above is a joke at your expense...
Its called DX+ (i think) and it is doesnt folllow the DX specifications. It is similar but has substantial differences to support the Xbox hardware. This information is comming from the head graphics programmer at BioWare.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magos
Bottom line: if you wrote DX code for PC it would not necessarily run for Xbox. You would have to port it to DX+ (once again, i dont remember if thats the right name)
Link?
It was explained at a seminar. Thats also how i know Star Wars: KOTOR was originally written in OpenGLQuote:
Originally Posted by Magos
Below is a quote from some dev's at the now defunct Presto (taken from a post mortem at Gamasutra.com)
Doesn't sound like there is too much of a difference between the API's if you can port an entire engine in a couple of days.Quote:
Once we started getting information about the Xbox, we immediately thought it would be the perfect path to move Presto away from PCs and onto consoles. We had previously determined that a move to the Sony Playstation 2 would cost Presto far more money then we had. The Xbox, by comparison, could be ported to in about a month. (Once we got a development kit, we ported our engine to the Xbox in a couple of days.) This savings was huge for a small company like us. We were able to immediately begin working on cool new features like vertex and pixel shaders instead of spending up to a full man-year porting code to the Playstation's unusual architecture. This gave us another six months of nothing to do but explore the Xbox and the gameplay dynamics of our next game, Whacked.
I suspect the differences are mainly under the hood, and probably some additional functionality, but as far as changing DX significantly, that goes against the spiel that MS used to sell the XBox originally. I could ask a friend of mine who works for a Games Company and who are about to release an XBox title, but unfortunately I may not see him for a week or two.
In my opinion the huge advantage to openGL lies within it's name - 'open' openGl libraries exist for virtualy every platform known to mankind. Use direct3d and it's windows or nothing... openGL is managed by a commite, which makes it a lot harder for you to get shot in the back by just one vendor. Theres also an important difference between directx and opengl - directx is a collection of api's - input, 3d, draw, sound etc... with openGL all it does is 3d drawing. This isn't really a problem though, and for most of my work I use SDL (http://libsdl.org) to take care of input and sound etc, and it's been ported to an enormous ammount of platforms too. Unfortunatly for openGL doing really fancy things tends to rely on hardware vendor specific extensions sometimes to get the best performances, and these extensions are non standard, and can be a bit of a headache somtimes having to write several different paths within a renderer (eg simple standard one, NVidia one, ATi one, 3dfx one :) ). On the positive side though the ARB (arcitecture review board) do review and try to standardise extenions, and I've heard positive things about oglsl (the shader language)
Alan