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General discussionWhy everyone keep using DirectX?(261 posts)(261 posts)
(261 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted July 06, 2015
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Johnathanamz: I was talking about average people like Sarah Gur or whatever think free products suck.
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shmerl: So first learn the difference between not paid (free) and liberated (free). I'm talking about free software (libre). Not sure what you are trying to say, but the argument "software sucks because it's free" is completely wrong.
I said the average damn person thinks free sucks. Also I hate free too.
Posted July 06, 2015
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Johnathanamz: I said the average damn person thinks free sucks. Also I hate free too.
No, average person likes free (as in free beer). Surprise, they save money. But again, we didn't discuss paying or not paying for something. We discussed open and closed technologies when contrasting open standards and lock-in.
Post edited July 06, 2015 by shmerl
Posted July 06, 2015
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Johnathanamz: I said the average damn person thinks free sucks. Also I hate free too.
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shmerl: No, average person likes free (as in free beer). Surprise, they save money.
Whatever. Arguing too much is burning me out lets just stop? I can argue more even if burnt out. But I am getting extremely mad too.
Posted July 06, 2015
Moving on from the Troll and his bait.... I wonder how long it its going take Vulkan to displace OpenGL as the open graphics api for games.
Posted July 06, 2015
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mike_cesara: I think it's not hard to guess who's keep posting here..
Must be the Developers
Posted July 06, 2015
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hedwards: Right, because you're not without bias there. I've been using computers for nearly 30 years ago. I remember what Apple was like before Apple OS, I remember DOS and I've used just about every major revision of both in the mean time. You're fooling yourself if you think that there was ever a time when MS was pushing the superior product.

As far as Linux goes, it's a hell of a lot more polished than Windows is. At least with Linux there's a solution to damn near every problem you might have. With Windows I often times find that there is no solution. I'm doing something that MS wasn't intending for me to do, so it's not possible. I remember having to manually edit the registry to fix the resolution because of corruption issues.

I'm not a particular fanboy, but you do have to admit that Windows is lacking in most departments. The only reason why they're everywhere is that they abused the hell out of their monopoly during the '90s and have convinced people that only Windows can do what they want. And apart from using a few Windows only products, that's never been true. There's nothing that people can do with Windows that can't be done with the competition. In many cases it requires more work to get things working on Windows than it does on OSX or Linux.
The first computer I used was running CPM, I certainly do have some experience with different operating systems and they have grown up over time. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux --I've always considered it a 'hacker's' OS even though today the most recent Ubuntu releases make it feel more like an average person's OS.

Yes, earlier versions of Windows sucked. However, Windows NT really rocked the boat and that they used that as their new base for Windows XP (although the "PlaySkool" UI was laughable), it started becoming a bit more respectable. I love Windows 7 (really not looking forward to the *free* 10 upgrade), and Windows 8 just went out of its way in User Interface design to piss me off right smartly. I have to suffer using 8 at work, but still use 7 at home.

They have the most market share right now and if that's where I can play my games, I'll move where the food is.
Posted July 06, 2015
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hedwards: I'm not convinced. DirectX is Windows only or now Windows and XBox only, the only reason that MS created it was to make it more challenging for developers to also support Apple computers.
That's a huge exaggeration of Apple's importance in the 90's. Also far as I could find OpenGL only came to the Mac on OS 8, so Direct3D predated OpenGL on the Mac. In short, you're dead wrong.

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hedwards: it's been around for a much longer time than DirectX.
The first version of OpenGL appeared in 1992, and far as I know was limited to SGI workstations at the time. The first company that implemented OpenGL in its OS (again, AFAIK) was Microsoft, in Windows NT. It also included OpenGL in Windows 95. So if anything, Microsoft was OpenGL's biggest supporter.

But it did want a gaming API to work with the newly released 3D accelerators, and OpenGL wasn't right for that (as I explained before), so it created Direct3D. And then it went and tried to merge it with OpenGL. According to Wikipedia:

"On December 17, 1997, Microsoft and SGI initiated the Fahrenheit project, which was a joint effort with the goal of unifying the OpenGL and Direct3D interfaces (and adding a scene-graph API too). In 1998, Hewlett-Packard joined the project. It initially showed some promise of bringing order to the world of interactive 3D computer graphics APIs, but on account of financial constraints at SGI, strategic reasons at Microsoft, and general lack of industry support, it was abandoned in 1999."

So yes, eventually Microsoft obviously decided that it was better to go its own way, but it's clear from the way history went that your perception of it is as wrong as it can get.
Post edited July 06, 2015 by ET3D
Posted July 06, 2015
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ET3D: but on account of financial constraints at SGI, strategic reasons at Microsoft, and general lack of industry support, it was abandoned in 1999."
To translate it to normal language. SGI already started having financial problems at that time (i.e. "financial constraints"), so improving the global state of graphics APIs was the least of their concerns, and MS decided that benefiting the industry at large doesn't fit with their usual EEE approach (i.e. "strategic reasons"). And the rest were too lazy and didn't have enough vision of where things were going ("general lack of industry support"). That was the end of the potentially positive outcome at that time. As you can see, since then MS sill didn't drop their EEE / lock-in thingie when it comes to graphics, despite the industry coming up with Vulkan. Their usual modus operandi is "push for lock-in when you can, but if competition is too strong, pretend that you care about open standards".
Post edited July 06, 2015 by shmerl
Posted July 06, 2015
TL;DR, but comparing DirectX to OpenGL (and I'm an OpenGL fan) is like comparing a car to a drivetrain. Direct3D can be compared to OpenGL because it offers roughly the same features. DirectX however is something akin to SDL, it's a huge stack for creating games. As for why people get used to it: convenience. People don't like change, so if you have a 100 engineers knowing how to work with DirectX they won't switch magically to OpenGL + something else for the other stuff (by other stuff I mean: DirectPlay, DirectSound, DirectInput etc.).
Posted July 06, 2015
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blotunga: TL;DR, but comparing DirectX to OpenGL (and I'm an OpenGL fan) is like comparing a car to a drivetrain. Direct3D can be compared to OpenGL because it offers roughly the same features.
It's obvious that DirectX means Direct3D in this context. The fact that DX has more stuff on top of D3D is irrelevant in this discussion.
Post edited July 06, 2015 by shmerl
Posted July 06, 2015
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hedwards: I'm not convinced. DirectX is Windows only or now Windows and XBox only, the only reason that MS created it was to make it more challenging for developers to also support Apple computers.
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ET3D: That's a huge exaggeration of Apple's importance in the 90's. Also far as I could find OpenGL only came to the Mac on OS 8, so Direct3D predated OpenGL on the Mac. In short, you're dead wrong.

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hedwards: it's been around for a much longer time than DirectX.
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ET3D: The first version of OpenGL appeared in 1992, and far as I know was limited to SGI workstations at the time. The first company that implemented OpenGL in its OS (again, AFAIK) was Microsoft, in Windows NT. It also included OpenGL in Windows 95. So if anything, Microsoft was OpenGL's biggest supporter.

But it did want a gaming API to work with the newly released 3D accelerators, and OpenGL wasn't right for that (as I explained before), so it created Direct3D. And then it went and tried to merge it with OpenGL. According to Wikipedia:

"On December 17, 1997, Microsoft and SGI initiated the Fahrenheit project, which was a joint effort with the goal of unifying the OpenGL and Direct3D interfaces (and adding a scene-graph API too). In 1998, Hewlett-Packard joined the project. It initially showed some promise of bringing order to the world of interactive 3D computer graphics APIs, but on account of financial constraints at SGI, strategic reasons at Microsoft, and general lack of industry support, it was abandoned in 1999."

So yes, eventually Microsoft obviously decided that it was better to go its own way, but it's clear from the way history went that your perception of it is as wrong as it can get.
Nothing in there changes reality. Even accepting all of that as facts, it doesn't really change reality here. MS regularly uses other people's ideas until they can twist them to their own ends. I take it the phrase "Embrace, extend and extinguish" isn't familiar to you. They tried the same thing with HTML during the browser wars and the main reason why they wound up winning was that they could ensure that all Windows computers had a copy of Internet explorer on them. And as a result a larger install base.

As far as DirectX goes, it is a much more recent standard and Microsoft could easily have joined the working group and improved it rather than creating an MS only API at a time when Windows was by far the largest source of OSes in the world.

I think ti's interesting how you choose to ignore the context within which all of this was going on.
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blotunga: TL;DR, but comparing DirectX to OpenGL (and I'm an OpenGL fan) is like comparing a car to a drivetrain. Direct3D can be compared to OpenGL because it offers roughly the same features. DirectX however is something akin to SDL, it's a huge stack for creating games. As for why people get used to it: convenience. People don't like change, so if you have a 100 engineers knowing how to work with DirectX they won't switch magically to OpenGL + something else for the other stuff (by other stuff I mean: DirectPlay, DirectSound, DirectInput etc.).
I have no particular issue with the other stuff. OpenGL didn't help with any of that and I'm not aware of any other option at the time other than coding that stuff from scratch. A lot of that would wind up being platform specific anyways as nobody had created a crossplatform set of libraries to do it. I certainly wouldn't blame MS for not making that section of API windows only.

But replacing something that was cross-platform with a Windows only API and then using the size of the company to ensure that was the version that was used is not something I can support.
Post edited July 06, 2015 by hedwards
Posted July 06, 2015
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hedwards: A lot of that would wind up being platform specific anyways as nobody had created a crossplatform set of libraries to do it. I certainly wouldn't blame MS for not making that section of API windows only.
SDL was developed since 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_DirectMedia_Layer#History and it's very commonly used in cross platform games.
Post edited July 06, 2015 by shmerl
Posted July 06, 2015
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hedwards: Nothing in there changes reality. Even accepting all of that as facts, it doesn't really change reality here. MS regularly uses other people's ideas until they can twist them to their own ends. I take it the phrase "Embrace, extend and extinguish" isn't familiar to you. They tried the same thing with HTML during the browser wars and the main reason why they wound up winning was that they could ensure that all Windows computers had a copy of Internet explorer on them. And as a result a larger install base.
Sounds like that's what you're trying to do with this thread.. Oh, let's not forget that people caught one in their own web of lies, let's just shrug it off and make it seem like someone else's fault.

Browser wars notwithstanding, Chrome is the word, hands down. I vote for a browser which adheres to the standards instead of allowing lax designers.

BTW, the fact that Windows came with a copy of Internet Explorer on it isn't a new concept. Since when in civilized history has *any* operating system come without some type of 'extra' on it? Heck, Notepad and Calculator (when was the last time you looked at Calculator?) are pretty darn useful in their own right.
Posted July 06, 2015
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hedwards: As far as DirectX goes, it is a much more recent standard and Microsoft could easily have joined the working group and improved it rather than creating an MS only API at a time when Windows was by far the largest source of OSes in the world.
How "much more recent" 1995 is compared to 1992? And Microsoft was part of the group. God, you're killing me with this "lalala, I can't hear the facts".

Microsoft was the first home computer OS maker to include any 3D acceleration, OpenGL was one option, creating a custom API was another. Microsoft included both. There's no need for being nefarious here. Any reasonable company would work on an API that would be the best fit to its product and what it feels the market need is. 3dfx had Glide, ATI had its own API, S3 had its own API, Rendition had its own API. It was the very start of 3D acceleration for PC's, and it made no sense to go through a long process of discussing how to adapt a workstation API that hardly anybody supported, and delay having a 3D API by a few years. That would have been plain stupid.
Posted July 06, 2015
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ET3D: That would have been plain stupid.
There is nothing stupid in developing interoperable standard. But MS always hated such approach.
Post edited July 06, 2015 by shmerl
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionWhy everyone keep using DirectX?(261 posts)(261 posts)
(261 posts)