12 Years of Portability Thanks to OpenGL: Mac - Windows - iPhone (and more)
blog.insightvr.comHow using a standards compliant library let me port a game that started as a CS course assignment to multiple platforms and eventually to the iPhone.
How using a standards compliant library let me port a game that started as a CS course assignment to multiple platforms and eventually to the iPhone.
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The list of games written with OpenGL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OpenGL_programs
Notable games: Doom 3, Far Cry, Max Payne, the Quake series, Red Faction, Runescape, Second Life, Spore, Star Wars: Jedi Knight and Star Wars: KOTOR, Unreal Tournament, UT2004, UT3, Warcraft 3, WoW.
Most of the big-name ones default to Direct3D when they're running on Windows though.
I have very little idea of how D3D and OpenGL work (I've never written anything substantial with them), but I'm very interested in the idea of an open standard for rendering games. That portability story in the post is great.
What's the deal with D3D? How is it better than OpenGL?
"OpenGL is an abstraction of 3D concepts with many vendor-specific extensions to enable performance. Direct3D is an abstraction of the most common implementation of real world 3D hardware. Game developers did, and continue to, unambiguously ask Microsoft to produce the latter."
Quoting myself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1038982
They were much of a muchness. Like a lot of things Microsoft, the early versions of D3D were pretty poor, but they listened to feedback from devs and so on and iterated it up to a worthwile competitor to OpenGL, which stood still for many a year (extensions notwithstanding).
Also early on I think driver support was an important factor in D3D getting traction, as proper OpenGL support was mostly only in the blindingly expensive workstation graphics market.
Nowadays I think on the PC most games are D3D because that gets you a long way towards an xbox360 port.
> a long way towards an xbox360 port.
"The Xbox (name derived from "DirectX box")"