With a preview version slated for November 2008 and beta versions as early as 2009, Microsoft's newest DirectX will be here sooner than you think. ExtremeTech's Loyd Case digs deep into DirectX 11 and discusses its new features and how it differs from DX10. While improved graphics are expected out of the new release, DX11 hopes to improve upon crunching complex graphics with the GPU through hardware tessellation, which many people hoped to see in DX10.
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Member since:2007-02-17
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSceneGraph
http://www.openscenegraph.org/projects/osg
http://www.openscenegraph.org/projects/osg/wiki/Links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)
http://www.blender.org/
http://www.blender.org/download/resources/
http://www.blender.org/download/python-scripts/
Enjoy.
Edited 2008-09-04 06:24 UTC
Member since:2006-08-15
There is SDL too.
http://libsdl.org/
Member since:2005-07-06
You missed the "better" bit. While all of those are fine projects and I've worked with several of them, I'd hardly say that they make a better game development platform than DirectX with all available tools. Also I wouldn't really call the OSG documentation excellent or even very good.
You cannot win converts with almost as good as, or even just as good as, you need to offer something noticeably better.
Member since:2005-07-07
Come on, don't be silly. Microsoft designed DirectX specifically to make game developers use it instead of OpenGL and lock them into Windows as gaming platform. Why in heaven whould they want to make it cross-platform? If they wanted that, they could've worked on OpenGL, SDL or created an open standard.
Member since:2005-08-11
Game developers can develop for any api they want, they aren't locked it, users are. If every game developer started using OpenGl on Windows, then MS would have to support that.
The game developers are willing participants in the lock in, because they want to sell games. Windows has the most marketshare, so they write for Direct X. If Game developers want the situation to change, they have the power to do it, but won't. Writing games that hit 90% of the market is more than good enough from a financial point of view. It's the low hanging fruit.
This little bit of lock-in is brought to you buy everyone, including apple, who usually ships it's machines with older or less powerful graphics hardware.
Member since:
2006-10-28
If there were a better cross platform toolkit for game development I'm sure it would get used. If someone built a complete easy to use toolkit that worked together with other things like physics engines or ogre we might see some more cross platform games. Especially if the toolkit could abstract the platform (ps2 ps3 xbox xbox360 pcwindows pclinux osx) with near native speed. It would also need documentation, community, and support.