pouët.net

except no serious developer is using it since it's slow beyond belief. but if your hallucinations bring you joy, hold on to them :)

We know .. the 90% of you are game developers or something near, so it would be silly to try to program in deep both APIs. Student of many, master of nothing. That's also, may be, the reason that some of you refuse to change to DX10.

Fortunally, the amateur programmer have more choices and in most cases have the privilege of studing issues without productivity applicacion in the game industry.

aeko: its more a case of support and stability of one api than the lack of abiity of the coder to keep more than one in his mind at once, believe me. an api is an api.
(speaking as a coder who switches between multiple apis continuously)

well I've been a lover of OpenGL (once a week, after work but dont tell the wife) for years now and before that GL. Recently though I started coding more in-depth stuff on a larger scale and OpenGl is just making it harder than it needs to be. At a bottom level you end up writing by hand eveything in DX anyway or munging your OGL data to call d3dx routines like npatch subdivision, raytracing or catmull-rom. State management is a pain. GLSL has less examples written for it than HLSL or CG it seems. No inverse modelview matrix. No decent SDK (just bits cobbled together) and tends to be slow(er) progress for new features.

But I love it and I'll stick with it with absolutely no logic behind that decision at all :-). Old fart springs to mind.

Actually there is gl_ModelViewMatrixInverse

hey so there is how the hell did i miss it - thanks shadez.

well, I've done a bit of opengl and a bit of direct3d. The reasons I love opengl are against logic (considering how hard it is to do simple things like, for example, multiple render targets/buffers or whatever they call it):

* Immediate mode. Yummy. glvertex glcolors... mmm
* These bloody crashes I had on the d3d because I overran a pointer of something. I mean, come on big deal. Just skip that you grumpy boots. Don't crash on me ! Opengl would just let you off.

And a german professor will come now and say "ya, but crash ist gut.". No, I just want the bloody thing to keep working, to keep limping to the very end.

well, that's my warped perspective anyway.

That may very well be the best quote ever.

Personally I think it's the same whether to use OpenGL or DirectX (I use OpenGL for now). Once you get the critical stuff wrapped (vertex buffers, textures, shaders and framebuffers, maybe few extensions e.g. cubemaps) there's no need to think about the API that much. And I agree with Navis that immediate mode is very nice, especially for demo projects that are usually kinda rushed and you need just some visible results quickly :)

Navis: You just convinced me that I'm not alone in my folly and that I have no need to switch ;)

Using Imediate mode takes as much lines of codes as opening a vertex buffer object.

Nobody cares whether you use OpenGL or DirectX except lunatic evangelists who want to convert you to their way of thinking.

I believe the final result is what counts, how you got there and what tools you used isn't so important.

OpenGL 3.0 looks like the logical next step to me. You can't just dump the whole API and start over without killing OpenGL entirely.

insectecutor: i only care if someone uses opengl/dx when it means it doesnt work on my home pc (ati). :)

Navis: it's not like writing an "immediate mode" (as you so unclearly call it - "immediate mode" is usually considered the rendering-model that both OpenGL AND Direct3D uses - ie ad-hoc rendering, and not a full scene-representation as in "retained mode") wrapper on top of some vertex buffers is difficult to do, either in D3D or GL (you'll actually see a nice performance improvement in GL since you can inline the calls, and dont have to do intra-library calls etc).

About the crashes, it's pretty much a matter of taste. Personally I like to have a place to hook my debugger, instead of blindly ignoring errors.

crashes are a lot more discreet than "this object doesnt appear on my card"

Speaking about objects that doesn't appear: I've always wanted to write an "OpenGL object finder", that automatically tries to find out where the fuck the geometry you just added appeared in world-space. Like, putting a 3d-arrow at the center of the screen pointing at the center of mass of your object, transformed to eye-space.

like PIX? ;)

I never saw that feature in PIX.. Where is it?

click on DrawPrimitive call, select Mesh tab, and you can see your object pre-VS, post-VS and viewport transformed

And while we're at that:
Isnt it a delicious irony that Microsoft PIX (ooooh evil corporation) is free, while the only debugger for OpenGL that gets close to it, gDebugger, costs $790 the cheapest? :)

glslDevil is nice.

rare: yeah i tried it, it works okay but it balks on a compressed exe and the featureset is rather limited :/

PIX looks quite neat. Is there the same thing for D3D mobile?

yeah writing memory you didn't allocate, that should just be tolerated.

(wtf are you saying?)

oh and those whole 'vs'-discussions are so incredibly boring. as smash said, an api is an api.