Linked by Kroc Camen on Fri 8th Jan 2010 21:25 UTC, submitted by kap1
Independent game company Wolfire write why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX. The article goes over a brief history and the standard and Microsoft's tactics with DirectX, and what this really means for developers. DirectX keeps games on Windows, and that's not a good thing--over half of the users for one of their games are not on Windows. The fact is that Microsoft will have you believe that DirectX is the better choice for gaming, but OpenGL has always had the best features, first, and in a consistent and transparent way. I'm particularly interested in the last couple of paragraphs where WebGL is mentioned because this is gaining traction with browser vendors and it would go directly against Microsoft's grain for them to implement it in IE--as they should. Will we see yet another generation of Microsoft ignoring the standards and going their own way with a 'WebDirectX'?
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Member since:2005-11-13
Actually Wolfire (the company who wrote the article) have found that over half of their paying customers are on mac or linux (which don't support DirectX). People on these systems may be small, maybe only a few % of the overall market, but think about how big that market is. It's still a very large amount of people (million? I'm not sure on the numbers...). Would you consider cutting out that many customers when you could just change technology and get them all?
I don't know. It depends on how much it would cost to switch technologies, and how much longer it would take to use OpenGL as opposed to DirectX. One thing these commercial game publishers know is money, and if they thought it was more profitable to make the switch, I'm sure they would. And they don't give a ding dong didly about idealism either, so if it ain't making them a big enough profit to develop for other platforms, then Mac and Linux users can eat sh*t and die for all they care.
Member since:2007-09-06
I'd buy and do far more gaming if I didn't have to stop everything I'm doing and reboot to Windows just because the one blob of code required DX. I'd happily shell out the cost of bleeding edge games if they offered more choice of platform.
For the game tuner geeks; how freaking high could you push your FPS counds if you could install that latest block buster on a minimal *nix install. No dumping resources into the rest of the system that's imposed through the Windows mega-install. WOW is already reported to run better on *nix and that's including the performance hit due to extra abstraction layers (wine/cedega).
Member since:2007-04-23
It also has to do with the number of potential customers...
Those markets may be smaller, but there is also a lot less competition... Selling into a smaller but less crowded market can often be very profitable if you get in early enough.
Incidentally, i had never heard of these games... I will be reading up on them later.
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Actually Wolfire (the company who wrote the article) have found that over half of their paying customers are on mac or linux (which don't support DirectX). People on these systems may be small, maybe only a few % of the overall market, but think about how big that market is. It's still a very large amount of people (million? I'm not sure on the numbers...). Would you consider cutting out that many customers when you could just change technology and get them all?
Edit: Also, ease of development doesn't really come into it because any developer worth their salt will wrap DirectX or OpenGL into a library instead of accessing the calls directly from the game code.
Edited 2010-01-08 22:55 UTC