I surfed on the net today and saw some review of game coding books. And in a lot of comments, people were saying things like : "Sample code is opengl so unusable for real game developping" i just can't understand why people are saying that. * i'm working on my 3D engine in OpenGL * Doom3 IS an OpenGL game * most of the people i know use OpenGL renderer in the halflife engine... so why people are saying OpenGL is dead for game programming ? -- vive la france --

OpenGL can be coded very inefficently. There's a good chance that the books which were reviewed contain code which isn't useful for game programming because it's too high-level; ie. it uses glBegin/glEnd blocks instead of the much faster glDrawElements. Also, it seems that DirectX has become more prevalent of late (even I'm using it) with the release of DirectX 9, and games like Doom 3 that only use OpenGL represent the exception these days, not the norm. Three other next-gen games, Half-Life 2, FarCry and the next incarnation of the Unreal Engine, are all built upon Direct3D 9. Coding multiple renderers these days seems to be a luxury that developers can't afford. Even with the protracted development of Half-Life 2 (it's about 5 years now), the complexity of modern engines means choosing a rendering API, and sticking with it. Don't forget that OpenGL and Direct3D are pretty much neck and neck when it comes to support for new features and for performance. However, Direct3D has consolidated support for things like floating-point buffers, which are a requirement of High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting. To do that in OpenGL, you need to use vendor-specific extensions, and it won't be until the next version of OpenGL that this is remedied. It's small things like this that are allowing Direct3D to take market share...