I’m well aware that you were talking about Valve’s more current games. I wasn’t even talking about Half-Life 2 since quite frankly the game has not gotten better with age, graphically of course. Valve utilized dx9 technology quite well, but they have to move on to DX10 so that they can take advantages of technology that will enhance the immersion in their games.
DirectX10 is only barely a step forward in terms of technical improvements: Remember when someone got Crysis to play on DirectX 9 using the same settings as on DX10? They were both almost identical, with only a slight bit of shadow quality differences. DX10 may be suitable as a stepping stone or perhaps even a good PR boost, but that’s about it in terms of worth.
DX11 is simply a much better improvement over 10, and while Valve will have to upgrade eventually, it would make more sense for them to include both instead of just the more archaic one. Even then, at the moment I see no real need for them to upgrade, even to DX11. They might not be cutting-edge in terms of graphical quality, but it has a lot more to do with what they’re willing to implement as opposed to what they have at their disposal.
Between DX and OpenGl, which is the easiest/flexible? Because when they started Mac support I was more than expecting Valve to start doing PC releases in OpenGl.
Does the Xbox360 use a totally different code to what DirectX and OpenGl is?
Yea, and a massive performance drop on DX10. :hmph:
Ever wondered why Microsoft calls it [COLOR=‘Black’]DirectXBox?
Xbox 360 uses a modified version of directx API. Remember also you can’t really directly compare OpenGL and DirectX. DirectX includes various API’s: Direct3D, DirectInput, DirectSound etc etc.
OpenGL is the equivalent to just Direct3D so it’s more complicated to compare them. OpenGL has been able to do tesselation and various other things for a while, M$ have only recently began to implement into Direct3D.
DirectX has become popular because of the massive microsoft PR machine. Open standards have no chance against the marketting muscle of m$.
Microsoft operating systems are also fussy about using openGL so most windows games will be DirectX (again an anti-competitive act by m$).
The most annoying thing about it all is if all developers used open standards then we could see games across all platforms and operating systems. Mac, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD would all be able to run the games.
cuz the original xbox was just a coppermine PIII with a Nvidia GPU using a custom version of dx8.1
I don’t think they really need to upgrade, I mean look at Dear Esther, the only thing it’s missing is ambient occlusion, and it looks just fine without it.
Also, Gabe implied in a Steamcast interview that Portal 2’s engine no longer supports Dx7, but he didn’t say anything about adding support for 10 or 11
bro… they dropped dx7 in portal 1 and all the HL2 games have been upgraded to the engine that doesn’t support dx7
this is not tru as the OS still use different core libery’s and hardick layouts and such.
Sounds like an 80’s TV show I would watch the shit of.
you’re partially wrong.
harddisk layouts are no problem, since you usually use relative paths for engine parts and libs.
If it would be so hard to change the libs for mouse input or whatever lib is different in each OS why are many Indie games available on every OS?
As far as I read it’s not much time consuming if you start the engine coding right.
There are also enough helper libs to reduce the amount of work to port an engine.
just look at glew for OpenGL
i mean that even if we all use openGl you wont be able to port games 1:1 you stilll have to moddify them them to fit on an other OS
Yes I know that you would still need a version for each OS. It would still be cheaper and less time consuming to release for multiple operating systems therefore it would be more likely.
You start then moving into driver issues. AMD in particular would need to step up their game in this regard as their open source drivers leave a lot to be desired.
Still it’s all hypothetical as it’s unlikely the industry will make the shift any time soon.
as I already said, if you start your engine coding right and use switchable libs and write your own switchable wrappers, then you can easily port the engine over to another OS.
Just look at all those indie projects, the old Unreal and ID Engines.
To switch to platform specific libs without modifying your code every compile you just use [COLOR=‘DeepSkyBlue’]#if defined(_WIN32) for example.