FW: 3D

[Greg Pettyjohn <GregP@bsquare.com>]

> Greg -- I'm not sure if you wanted this to go to the list or
> not.  Please feel free to forward my comments as you wish.  :)

Yeah, I originally wanted to send this to the list, but sent it just to you
(Brent) instead. Doh!

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brent Fulgham [mailto:brent.fulgham@xpsystems.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2000 11:06 AM
> To: Greg Pettyjohn
> Subject: RE: 3D
> 
> 
> Greg -- I'm not sure if you wanted this to go to the list or
> not.  Please feel free to forward my comments as you wish.  :)
> 
> > > I'm not sure that your statements about OpenGL are accurate.
> > > Or do the frame rates produced in games like Doom or Quake to be 
> > > intolerable?  Both of these were written to the OpenGL API,
> > > not DirectX.
> > 
> > Without knowing whether I prefer either API, I'm curious:
> > What was used for Quake 3? I've seen it on some of the 
> computers here
> > at work and it looks really nice.
> > 
> Quake 3 is OpenGL.  Here is an interesting reference from gaming
> god John Carmack:
> 
> http://www.thekeep.org/~rmitz/carmack.on.opengl.html
> 
> With choice quotes like:
> 
> "I started porting glquake to Direct-3D IM with the intent of 
> learning the api and doing a fair comparison.
> 
> Well, I have learned enough about it. I'm not going to finish
> the port. I have better things to do with my time."
> 
> and later:
> 
> "Direct-3D IM is a horribly broken API. It inflicts great pain
> and suffering on the programmers using it, without returning any
> significant advantages. I don't think there is ANY market segment
> that D3D is apropriate for, OpenGL seems to work just fine for 
> everything from quake to softimage. There is no good technical 
> reason for the existance of D3D.
> 
> I'm sure D3D will suck less with each forthcoming version, but this
> is an oportunity to just bypass dragging the entire development 
> community through the messy evolution of an ill-birthed API."
> 
> To be fair, this was some 4 years ago, so things may be better
> now.  Still, I really see no reason to bother with DirectX when
> it's only going to buy you the Win32 market.
> 
> > We've also got some dreamcast development boxes in the tools 
> > group here that I've seen. Dreamcast runs CE, but I don't think
> > it uses DirectX.  Rather I expect it uses some proprietary 
> > hardware/software from sega.
> > 
> And that's really a large part of the problem.  Special API's
> are often written to maximize the features of particular
> hardware, which is great for performance but bad for portability.
> 
> 
> > I just read an interesting article (unfortunately I deleted 
> > it --- doh!) about the new playstation. The impression I'm
> > getting is that the gameboxes are doing a lot of the work 
> > in the hardware --- I don't expect they use either 
> > DirectX or OpenGL to expose this hardware to the applications 
> > programmer.
> > 
> Well -- often OpenGL abstracts the hardware-accellerated
> routines.  Mesa, for example, can often be built with hardware
> detection so that instead of performing various rendering
> or polygon handling routines in software, it will pass them
> off to the hardware implementation.  Of course, this assumes
> you have documents that describe this API -- which is not
> always the case :)
> 
> > Perhaps we're arguing over who wins third place!
> > 
> Indeed!  It's interesting that Carmack is one of the advisors
> for Microsoft on the XBox.
> 
> > Maybe we should port MzScheme to the new Playstation platform 
> > forget about PC's. It might be nice. I'm sick of windows and 
> > Unix doesn't look like it's going to be much fun either.
> > 
> *gasp*
> 
> > :-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-)
> > 
> :-)
> 
> -Brent
>