OpenGL hasn't been cutting edge since before DX8 came out. Now they are just cross platform and playing catch up. They had one foot in the grave when D3D8 came out, and then Ms left the ARB and released D3D9 and they were officially dead in the water.

OpenGL became redundant for a few reasons.

- They keep adding messy extensions onto an old, outdated base API. D3D is like a sports car, and OpenGL is like a scooter that keeps getting side cars attached to it.

- The company that has the most installed graphics chips on home machines has the crappiest drivers. It really sucks to write perfectly legal code and have the horrible intel implementation completely botch your whole program. Even worse when one of the driver versions reported supporting OpenGL 1.2 but didn't actually support most 1.2 extensions.

Have you ever hung out on the user forums for 3D software written in OpenGL? Every time the program gets patched there is a flood of intel users reporting that the program is broken or crashes with strange errors, and the devs have to write workarounds for everything they added.

What good is a standard when no one follows it? Especially when the company that has the biggest share of the GPU market doesn't have a working implementation on most of their models of GPU and has no intention of fixing it. People think it's all about ATI and nVidia, when they are really only competing for second and third place.

When I wanted to write a polished game and publish it, I gave up on OpenGL because of all those problems. All my target audience was going to have those GPUs. I can't be dealing with all that crap. I want to write something that just works. Instead of being creative, I had to look over my code and keep blindly recompiling to try and prevent my friend's intel gpu from rendering my game with a wireframe overlay, and random faces being culled, when I had no calls for wireframe drawing mode in my whole app, and culling disabled. [lol]

The ARB just takes years to try and agree on a header file, and they have to make everyone happy and cater to every possible interest at the same time. And then, they just give us that header and they leave it at that. Everyone else has to do all the work. Even to the point where a member of this forum has to write a library to easily access the extensions. Why couldn't the ARB get off their asses and make their own GLEE like header for everyone to use??

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I think it's time to let this horse die and let another company step forward and create a cross platform 3D games API. Why hasn't apple been spending money to develop their own DirectX like technology? Maybe even license Direct3D?

This is an unbelievable letdown. I kind of saw it coming, but I never expected the ARB to fail on such an immense scale. I find it astonishing how far some people can be removed from reality, and yet not be immediately fired due to overwhelming incompetence. This is the death of modern OpenGL. Thank you very much ARB. What Microsoft never managed, you did. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

After hearing these news, we will be starting the end-of-life plan for our OpenGL renderer in the very near future (XP compatibility and quad buffered stereo are the only features holding it back), and will be focusing on D3D10 exclusively from now on.

Oh, and we are a CAD software manufacturer...

I really wonder if there is some remote possibility to take legal action against the ARB / Khronos after this total fiasco.

Quote:
The intent there is to provide for an orderly simplification of the specification and drivers for upcoming releases, the next of which is scheduled for less than 12 months from now.

Haha, good one. At least they haven't lost their (very strange) sense of humour...

Not that it matters much, but I'm sure the Comparison of OpenGL and Direct3D wikipage slants a certain way.

I wonder then, as Macs are becoming more popular these days... and more people play games - will Apple / Linux community implement and extend to keep up with DX? Or do something new?

I'd imagine implement + extend would fragment the platform though, potentially taking away some of the cross-platform-ness.

Quote:Original post by rbarris

BTW we have set up a mail reflector specifically for questions and suggestions specifically relating to game development using OpenGL 3.0 - if there is some piece of hardware functionality not addressed by the current 3.0 spec, now is exactly the right time to let us hear about it.

gamedev@khronos.org

Thanks for that. Though TBH I think you may be one of the few game developers with the resources to carry on using GL. It's not that anything has gotten signifantly worse, it's that not enough things have gotten better to counter the long-standing lack of freely available tools and support (compared to D3D). A fresh new API would have gone some way to countering the problem, but would still have only been a stop-gap.

For example; the company I work for refuses to consider OpenGL simply because of the percieved lack of support. OpenGL 3 wasn't going to change that, but the impression given by the recent problems is that support is getting worse not better.

I realise these aren't technical issues, sorry. Overall I think the problem here is that for a while it seemed Khronos would make OpenGL as easy to work with as Direct3D, and the long wait and shiny new version number made people hope for something bigger even than what was promised.

Less than 12 months.

Deprecation model, eh? I have a much simpler deprecation model, rbarris - FREEZE GL 2.1, and design GL3 from scratch. This was promised to us. It was a lie. OpenGL died today.

I wrote the gamedev@khronos.org asking where's the API that was promised and what the hell were they doing for the last year that they couldn't talk with the community about. I doubt I'll get a sincere response, but I want to know how they could catastrophically fail in moving this standard forward. I understand legacy code bases probably better than then next guy (anybody play with DIS And HLA simulations?), but this is ridiculous. Where is the progress they promised?

Bob