[pjmlp]

Because for fonts, textures, windowing, effects, materials, requires the use of third party libraries outside the spec.

Also it is stuck in a C world API, with each binding being a third party library with different degrees of coverage.

[shmerl]

All of that is outside of the spec. That has nothing to do with 3D graphics. MS just lumped it all together and called it DX.

[nl]

I think that is kind of the point.

[shmerl]

Well, it's a counter point really, since all of that is unportable (without such kind of translation).

As developers put it here[1]: "Don't make a game that depends on Direct3D. All the hard hard work is getting the thing to run with OpenGL".

1. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/about-linux-games-bei...

[euos]

That's stupid. Competent 3d on Windows is DirectX. Competent 3d on Mac/ios is Metal. Competent 3d on consoles uses their propriatary API. So, what is the point of OpenGL portability? Between Linux and Android? You _will_ have to switch API if you are making anything worthy.

[klodolph]

That's some impressive graphics fetishism on display there. It's hard not to take offense at the comment that anything less is not "worthy". Not everyone is a AAA studio with an engine development team, nor should everyone hold themselves to those standards of engine performance.

OpenGL 3.3 is a pretty nice target. It's easy to port an OpenGL 3.3 game to a lot of systems, including mobile, since OpenGL ES 2.1 is pretty similar, and Windows XP, which cannot run DirectX 10. (This matters less as time goes on, but it's been an important point in certain markets in Asia.) So you can write the graphics code once, more or less, and run it everywhere, more or less.

The idea that somebody who chooses to do this is therefore not "competent" just boggles the mind. No point in deriding engineers who decide not to use the latest bells and whistles in the graphics pipeline. Maybe they just have other priorities.

(To clarify: the recommendation that everyone should just use OpenGL regardless of situation is, in fact, stupid. So I agree with that part. But it's equally stupid to say that everyone should use D3D12 / Metal regardless of circumstance.)

[MaulingMonkey]

> That's some impressive graphics fetishism on display there.

More like compatibility and stability fetishism. nVidia and AMD can't even agree on how to compile the same GLSL shader - I'm much more confident about my ability to ship working D3D9 or D3D11 than OpenGL without a QA team with a wide range of hardware and driver revisions. D3D? Uniform bytecode. Uniform debug layers. Nice. Being indie just makes it easier - simpler rendering pipelines, easier to port.

For Android dev, where I have no choice about using e.g. OpenGL ES 2, the compatability mess is so bad that even for solo dev, I've been eyeing AWS Device Farm and Xamarin Test Cloud. Maybe AAA studios can afford the QA time - but I can't even afford enough phones to test to my satisfaction. And in my heart of hearts, I blame OpenGL, even if it's really the fault of mobile GPU vendors. I have a much weaker urge for a PC device farm, where D3D mostly just works. It'd be a much stronger urge if you threatened me with the prospect of supporting desktop OpenGL.

Biggest company I've worked for had about 50 people, usually on a much smaller team. I don't think that's AAA. Wasting milliseconds left and right, we didn't need much per-platform tuning - still lower hanging fruit around. Still almost agree with euos. Aside from compat - getting OpenGL working on a console or in the WinRT sandbox is probably more work and worse results than just doing a straight up port. Worst of all worlds.

> The idea that somebody who chooses to do this is therefore not "competent" just boggles the mind. No point in deriding engineers who decide not to use the latest bells and whistles in the graphics pipeline. Maybe they just have other priorities.

Agreed - competent engineers and managers may decide that competent 3d support not worth their time. I welcome this restraint when it comes to Excel's pie charts and the good fight against scope creep. If you're targeting the holy trifecta of Windows, Linux, OS X, and little else - OpenGL might be right for your MVP and your launch window.

Yet I'd still be eyeing that OpenGL on Windows as possible technical debt. Hell, I basically look at OpenGL ES on Android as unsolvable technical debt. I'd have a hard time labeling it "competent 3d". And I'd be wondering if it was really better than D3D9 + Wine.

Metal might be a little flavor-of-the minute. I need to give it a shot sometime...

[Const-me]

> OpenGL 3.3 is a pretty nice target

Intel HD 3000 (6 years old, much newer then Windows XP) only supports OpenGL 3.1 on Windows.

VmWare workstation only supports OpenGL 3.0 for Win7 guests.

Direct3D 11 works flawlessly on both of them.

[shmerl]

That's smart. Those who don't think about it in advance, are bitten by this later. Read the article above.

Metal is Apple's lame attempt to tax cross platform graphics developers. That's exactly what is emphasized there.

[cwyers]

The article you linked to is advice from people who port games to Linux on how to make games more portable. It's not advice on how to ship them on time, how to make them performant, how to minimize the amount of developer labor required to build them. Given what a small share of the market Linux is for games, developers have other priorities than what makes games easy to port to Linux. And it's not a chicken-and-egg problem; the Linux market for games isn't much smaller than the Linux market for any other commercial software.

[klodolph]

I'm going to agree with cwyers here. The choice of which graphics API to use is not automatic, and "just use OpenGL, dummy!" just glosses over the fact that different developers have different priorities.

OpenGL gets you desktop and mobile all in one fell swoop (well, with a lot of tinkering and hard work). If that's your market, sure, go ahead. If you're writing a higher-end game targeting consoles and PC, then you'll end up doing a lot of extra work porting your engine to consoles and in return have access to a much larger market. Those consoles don't really support OpenGL, at least not as a first-class citizen, but one of them does support Direct3D. Direct3D also has excellent developer support.

Given the good support, good tool integration, and the fact that Direct3D runs on, say, two of your three most important platforms, it's a good choice.