Thread: Why use Direct3D?

  1. #31
    spurious conceit MK27's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bubba View Post
    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.
    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.

    2x2.2 GHz pentium, flash/firefox in FC10-64bit
    C programming resources:
    GNU C Function and Macro Index -- glibc reference manual
    The C Book -- nice online learner guide
    Current ISO draft standard
    CCAN -- new CPAN like open source library repository
    3 (different) GNU debugger tutorials: #1 -- #2 -- #3
    cpwiki -- our wiki on sourceforge

  2. #32
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    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.

  3. #33
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    When I think of 'speed' neither Flash nor Silverlight are first and foremost on my mind.

  4. #34
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    Quote Originally Posted by cyberfish View Post
    J++ - slightly modified Java that runs only on Windows. Good thing Sun won the lawsuit and killed it.
    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.

    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?

  5. #35
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    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
    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.

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    They GPL'd it in November of 2006, long after their attempts to dominate the industry failed.

  7. #37
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    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.

    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.
    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.

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    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. :-)

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    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?...

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    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.

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    Haha I see what you mean.

    Does such a language exist?

  12. #42
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    Quote Originally Posted by cyberfish View Post
    Haha I see what you mean.

    Does such a language exist?

    C and C++ for starters.

  13. #43
    spurious conceit MK27's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by medievalelks View Post
    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.
    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).

    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...
    C programming resources:
    GNU C Function and Macro Index -- glibc reference manual
    The C Book -- nice online learner guide
    Current ISO draft standard
    CCAN -- new CPAN like open source library repository
    3 (different) GNU debugger tutorials: #1 -- #2 -- #3
    cpwiki -- our wiki on sourceforge

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