Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by marshray 5464 days ago
The moderate experience I have with OpenGL confirms this explanation. However, it sort of misses the point. The author may be a bit too close to OpenGL to judge the relative significance of the all the historical details he knows.

Take a step back:

A) There's no way in hell Microsoft would allow OpenGL to take the lead from Direct3D on Windows and Xbox. They would wield the carrots and the sticks to prop up Direct3D (and perhaps even disadvantage OpenGL) if it ever came down to it.

B) OpenGL is a success by any objective measure. Nearly every platform except Windows and Xbox uses it exclusively. E.g. mobiles. Game consoles may have dedicated APIs but I'm sure there's a better OpenGL compat layer than a Direct3D.

Recently I've developed some code on Linux for OpenGL 3.3 with GLSL and it is awesome.
2 comments
kenjackson 5464 days ago
OpenGL is a success by any objective measure

OpenGL is a success. D3D is a success. Two competing products/APIs/services can both be successes. The game is about providing solutions. Both D3D and OpenGL did that for a large customer base. It's not about winning/losing, but does it help solve your problem.

link
SoftwareMaven 5464 days ago
Microsoft went down the D3D (well, the entire DirectX) path to court developers. They knew Windows95 could be much more successful if they could make it so developers could more easily write games for it. Developers were dying for reasonable abstraction layer on PC hardware. When 3D hardware became affordable, OpenGL continued its primary focus on perfection, which didn't give game developers what they needed (good enough, but FAST).

(Side note: If you ever want to pull your hair out, try going back in time to convert a DOS game written in X86 assembly using Mode X[0] blts that had been converted and tweaked from 68k assembly standing arcade game into a DirectX game a few months after DirectX is released for Windows95. Just figuring out how to convert the game time [which came from the sound card] into the DirectX world was unreal.)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X

link