tonycox - I say well played sir! You have been a voice of reason in a rabble of opinionated,uninformed and childish rants. It really irritates me the way people get all factionist about this sort of stuff, I think most of the people who were ranting about OpenGL being so much better etc,etc probably don't even know why they think it is better they just end up saying it for the sake of it. I also think that a lot of the support for OpenGL amongst the amateur development community is because of Quake and John Carmack's well known dislike of DirectX ( though that was a quote about a very old version of DirectX ) so people think "Oh the mighty Carmack has spoken, we must all agree with what he says because he writes the Quake engines, which is supposedly the most cutting edge software available. If the majority of the people on this board are serious about getting jobs in the games industry as developers then they are going to have to learn to be a bit more open-minded about technical issues and preferably READ A BIT ABOUT THE SUBJECT BEFORE TRYING TO PUSH YOUR ILL INFORMED OPINIONS DOWN EVERYBODY ELSE'S THROAT. I'm sorry if this has sounded a bit nasty but one thing that really gets my back up is people ( especially technical people ) trying to push unintelligent and ill thought out opinions on everyone else.

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tonycox - I say well played sir! You have been a voice of reason in a rabble of opinionated,uninformed and childish rants.

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I agree wholehartedly (even though some of these rants may have come from me, but that's not for me to judge). I'm not against DirectX in itself but I do have a bit of a prejudice against anything that has the name MS on it and I won't accept arguments that aren't 100% sound from them. I don't know, maybe I've just seen too many blue screens in my life. Furthermore I'd like to say that I absolutely don't have anything against Tony (hence I refer to MS as "they", not as "you"), from your posts here you seem like a nice guy. ------------------ jsr@dds.nl UIN #14961705 We could still be friends

I'm quite new to the whole OpenGL / DirectX / Win32 programming thing in general (i've spent _far_ to long programming for DOS with DJGPP that is for me and already I can see that Direct X is the way forward (for me anyway). From when I first looked into windows programming when DX5 was current until now, DX7, the API has matured alot and I believe that in the future it will only continue to grow. As for COM, I come from a C only background. It's only recently that I have moved onto C++ and COM and I have not found it the struggle that some others seem to. I've started to program a few things in direct x and I haven't got all the reams of "useless" code that many people say you need to use to get anywhere in DX (but then, maybe i'm doing something wrong I can see by the quality of games that are released under DirectX that it is not at all bad (that isn't saying OpenGL games are bad mind you - look at Quake 3). Anyways.... i've added my thoughts - pointless as they may seem to all of you..... laters ------------------ Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.... _________________________ Maverick

NuFAN: Your whole answer to my post has really nothing to do with what i have written in that post. Sorry, but if you review it you hopefully can understand what i mean.

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I know the difference between OpenSource and Freeware, but most people who use Linux prefer this OS because nearly anything is freeware.

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My post was only about the difference of freeware and OpenSource (and the fact that you can make money with OpenSource) and not about why people like Linux or if people wouldn't like Linux if it were commercialized or whatever you thought.

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If Linux were the standard-OS, it'd be the same situation as under Windows and all the guys who liked it because everything was for free want a new OS. There won't be any improvement IMO.

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I never denied that in my post nor have i aggreed. I don't even have mentioned it.

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Linux is a nice OS, but I don't think it's better for home-users than Win9x. Everyone can use Windows, but think about all those home-user-dummies who don't know where to find the 'A' on the keyboard. Do you think they'll be able to use it ? If there's a standard-desktop which is easy to use and the developers decide to develop software for Linux, than maybe. But not in the actual situation.

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Oh what an interpretation of my post Sounds to me that you have thought that i wanted to make a comparison between Windows and Linux. In case you shouldn't notice: OpenSource != freeware NOT Windows vs. Linux.

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Have you read how many units IBM, Maxon, Corel, ... sold for Linux ? Just a few. And that's the reason why it's not worth developing for an OS which is used only by 5% of the users. And those are mostly freaks. Remember a few days back, when DOS was the standard. Everyone wanted a new, easy-to-use OS which works with every hardware. Now we have this OS and a standard - there might be better solutions - and everyone wants a new OS.

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I also never denied that you can sold more units for Windows than for Linux. That should be obvious because of the percentage of linux users just as you have written (self-answered). I also don't want nonstandardization nor do i want to abolish Windows.

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And think about IBM. Do they develop their products only for Linux ? No, because it's not worth it. And they won't in the near future, maybe in a few years, but not yet. They want to earn some money and they can earn some money by porting their existing programs to Linux within a few weeks. But try develop a product for 2 years and then sell them only 20.000. You'll be bankrupt before you sold only one unit. And if all the software is available for Windows, the normal users won't choose Linux.

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And think about my post. Do i have written that this is the case ? I also don't said that OpenSource is much better than "real" commercialization. I only said that you can make enaugh money with it to drive a company. So all in all i only denied your statement that you cannot make money by developing software for Linux. The rest of your answer is missinterpretation of my post. P.S.: I mean no harm with that post but if you interpret something into my post what obviously didn't follow from my post or if you generalize what i said, i have to make it clear. So please don't answer to hasty (unfortunately i have sometimes the same problem but i try to get better ). I hope that you aren't mad at me now and that we can be friends again VirtualNext [This message has been edited by VirtualNext (edited 01 December 1999).]

D3D SUCKS BIGTIME!!!! When I just started programming in VC++ 6.0 (I used BC++ 4.52 before) I had never heard of OpenGL! It was a true NIGHTMARE to learn D3D!!! There are sample applications enaugh but that isn't enaugh! Modifying applications is very irritating. There are much less OpenGL sample apps but there is much and g d documentation (Try the NeHe samples). I think D3D is going to be no more s n!!!

This is quite an old thread. You're obviously as bored as i am

Whoa, first post on the new board. That's a rather silly comment...D3D is by far not dead. In fact, OpenGL is hardly used compared to D3D for games, simply because Windows is the major platform and most gamers don't even have other OSes, and even if they do they've accepted the fact that games run on Windows only (which is sad, but alas. Creating games for other OSes is somewhat harder than with Windows as well, so it's understandable. Give it some time). And it fits in nicely with the rest of DirectX. The fact that you find it hard to learn doesn't make it bad, come on. But let's not bring back dead threads and silly discussions (I think there's something in the FAQ about Direct3D vs. OpenGL). Side note about the new board: In line with previous comments I'd have to say that the new layout sucks, but I can't, because it's great. Well done Jamie!. Furthermore the post counter is back (woohoo!). One slight something: can you set the background to white explicitly? My browser default is a greyish blue, which doesn't look very bad with the other colours, but still isn't the white it's intended to be. Oh, and the smiley message icons are gone! Not good!

Here folks, I'll put it nice and easy for most of you to understand with out getting into all sorts of technical details... Use what you like, simple as that Not what others tell you to use (unless you want to make an xbox game where'd use D3D) Yes OpenGL and Direct3D evangelists can point out that we can do this, and they can do this, but it does this, etc.. But, If you haven't encountered the things they point out, you should just use which ever one you want to... I mean do you really care to know that in D3D if you use certain types of instructions in the pixel shaders, your trusting the driver writer to decompose your code into the most optimial way to feed to the hardware, where in OpenGL if you where using register_combiners you have "all this control to your self"? And also remeber, querying for a bit is almost the exact same thing as checking if an extension exsits. Just diffrent ways to do it.. I mean you shouldn't worry about these things unless your at the point of using them.. Just some food for thought, And i mean, if you don't like the way the API works out.. just switch. Personally, my prefernce is for nvOpenGL, but I make sure to port my code to D3D just so i don't fall behind in learning the API's.. laterz, -akbar A.

Ahhrggg, as always I missed the war... NuFaN: I have to admit that Linux sucks ass in terms of a home-user os! Sometimes I even get the impression that even Windows seems to be too hard to be used... Well, anyway, about that opensource != freeware thingy, as Virtual_Next said it depends on your license. AFAIK all id products are 'opensourced' after they've been released and sold, and AFAIK your engine for NT2040 (or what was it called?) supports quakeish elements (at least from what I saw on the screenshots ), so you had to get the info somewhere... by backtracing this chain of people who wrote tutorials about Q3 file formats etc. the root must be someone who either had a very long, sleepless night or who read the source, but thats not the point! The point is: You don't loose money if your project gets open source, but this way it can be improved! The reason why linux is a stable OS is not because Trovalds is a godlike programmer (though he is ), but because there are somewhat more brainiac people out there, often not recognized as good programmers... Now my additon to the topic: I use OpenGL. At the very beginning I was using Gilde *cough*, but since it was limited to the graphic card, I switched. The OGL syntax was more like Glide, so I sticked with OGL first. I still wan't to learn DX as well, but after I finished my current project. Could somebody please explain to me the difference between this Intermediate - and Retard Mode and what's it all about?