ATI offers DirectX - OpenGL Shading Language Translator

[belal1]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/hlsl2glsl/

machine generated translation? :torture:

btw, for those that don't know. this is a battle between open source and proprietary system in the gaming world. if more people could move onto open platforms like openGL and openAL, maybe even SDL, then microsoft's dominance in gaming could collapse. and to add to the battle, microsoft's new XNA platform is gonna be really awesome, allowing people to code once, and have it run on pc, xbox360 and other devices. since XNA is gonna be that good... it simply means, more and more developers will be locked into using M$ systems, and gaming remains a M$ thing. :(

[Al-Saeed Abdi]

I thought OpenGL was old? and forgotten.

Ma'aSalaama

[belal1]

I thought OpenGL was old? and forgotten.

Ma'aSalaama

na brotha... opengl is alive and kicking. epic megagames (makers of unreal/tournament, gears of war, etc) and id software (makes of doom, quake, etc) are like the two biggest opengl supporters.

the reason why u probably don't hear about it as much is because microsoft has that vendor lock in with directx. see they created directx to make it easy on game developers by having a whole package (direct3d, directsound,directplay, etc). its a whole stack of software which is a one for all solution. problem is, microsoft only makes directX for windows (and xbox/360). once developers get comfortable with programming on there, they get lazy to program in openGL because now openGL is not that great since it doesn't come in a whole stack. the developers gotta use different tools now.

id software and epic megagames knows this though. this si why they still support openGL and hence why u see their games come out on mac and linux (because openGL is portable unlike directX).

the latest version of openGL 2.0 (or was it 2.1?) is pretty sweet from what i understand. soem cards can't even support it since its so advanced.

[Al-Saeed Abdi]

Hmm.. interesting, yes I remember OpenGL was huge when it first came out. I had it with my 4mb ATI All-in-Wonder Pro graphics/multimedia card. Even at that time Unreal 1 played a lot better on it, heck all (if not most of) the shoot em' ups (almost) required it for better game play. But it has been many years since I've last played computer games.

Why don't ID and Epic (and others) make it into a co-op opensource of some sort.

Ma'aSalaama

[belal1]

Hmm.. interesting, yes I remember OpenGL was huge when it first came out. I had it with my 4mb ATI All-in-Wonder Pro graphics/multimedia card. Even at that time Unreal 1 played a lot better on it, heck all (if not most of) the shoot em' ups (almost) required it for better game play. But it has been many years since I've last played computer games.

Why don't ID and Epic (and others) make it into a co-op opensource of some sort.

Ma'aSalaama

well, they kinda are supporting this together by sticking with openGL. openGL is a free as in beer type of open source api (hence the name OPEN-GL). there are some other small companies that's getting into releasing openGL games, but not enough. EA, UBISOFT and the other big publishers all seem to have pacts with microsoft and directx. but who knows.... maybe if the operating systems grew having bigger installed bases, then these publishers would look at openGL more seriously since they can port to other OSes unlike with DirectX.