Those of you who had been following my articles at BeNews last year, you probably remember the France-based RealTech-VR and their effort to bring a Direct3D-to-OpenGL wrapper to the BeOS. The company paused most of that effort when was clear that BeOS was stopped being developed, but after pressure from the community, they have now open sourced their D3D-2-GL implementation and work has already started to port the wrapper to MacOS and Linux in an effort to bring Direct 3D to more alternative operating systems. Today we feature a mini-interview with Stephane Denis of RealTech-VR about the implementation.
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Excellent question, I'm eager to know too. Because if it's under GPL, I considere it a sad (partial) waste. Still good for open-source games, that would close all door for any viable commercial use...
In fact, is it possible that the source is "open" without any license ? Like no restriction, here's the code, do what you want !
Ummm...GLDirect by SciTech actually emulates OpenGL using the
DirectX drivers, while this seems to be the other way round. So
his comment that "...a solution already exists" seems untrue
to me.
Or am I missing something here?
Once you know how to take the API one way its a simple reversal to perform the DX to GL calls.
Maybe Transgaming could use this in a future release of WineX.... Thoughts?
Hey Steve,
If it's under the GPL, commercial game vendors could still buy a non-GPL license from the authors. No problems there.
"If it's under the GPL, commercial game vendors could still buy a non-GPL license from the authors. No problems there."
Ok, great, thanks for the info ! That make sense...
here's the code, do what you want ! Looks like the BSD license, no ?
Please make it a part of the GameKit!
If the license is right?
/Konrad
it would be nice to see some group other than Transgaming Working with this code in an effort to use it in wine.
/********************************************************************* *******
; *
; * File : d3dx.cpp
; *
; * Description : Direct3D 8 Wrapper
; *
; * Copyright © Realtech VR 2001
; *
; * Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell this software
; * and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee,
; * provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and
; * that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear
; * in supporting documentation. Realtech makes no representations
; * about the suitability of this software for any purpose.
; * It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
; *
; ********************************************************************** *****/
"Please make it a part of the GameKit! If the license is right? "
That's definitley something I will propose. For sure it will not be included in R1 (we aim for a complete R5 clone) but for R2 we start adding new things.
that people can now play windows games on a non-windows system? or does it just make the porting simpler?
Just the porting. That help to be source compatible, but not binary compatible.
I personnaly like DirectX as a game API. Programming using this interface under others OS may be fun.
My only concern: DirectX is more than an API, but a kind of direct interface upon hardware drivers that need to be DirectX compliant (espacially video cards drivers) to be really powerfull and usefull.
Having the same API will not give the power of it, unless other OS drivers start to support DX, which I really doubt.
So, the more I think about it, the less I found it of real use except for a quick & dirty port of a Windows game.
Is that make sense ?
Umm, it is not just a reversal to map from one API to another. APIs don't map to each other cleanly. Writing a mapping from GL -> DX is much harder than writing one from GL -> DX because DX incorporates a lot more features, plus it is object based, which makes it harder to map to a C API.
"Writing a mapping from GL -> DX is much harder than writing one from GL -> DX because DX incorporates a lot more features,..."
I agree that DX is more complex due to its object nature, but once you understand the DX object functions and data structures and their relationships to the OpenGL framework it becomes a lot simpler to do the API conversion.
Issues like sound, input etc are a totally different ballgame tho...
I prefer SDL+GL and its companion libs.
For simple use you can use it plain and for complex uses you can just use the addon lib.
Who cares about DX?
(surely that wrapper wil make easier have quick and dirty conversion but for starting projects SDL+GL is a better choice IMHO complexity wise and portability wise(including Ps2 HW;))
"Who cares about DX?"
About 99% of every game studio/publishers :-)
"surely that wrapper wil make easier have quick and dirty conversion but for starting projects SDL+GL is a better choice IMHO complexity wise and portability wise(including Ps2 HW"
Never underestimate the power of the market share :-)
Windows + XBox = DirectX. Which is way sufficient at the eyes of game publishers management ...