Wow, I''m absolutly amazed, it seems everyone has given up argueing. I find it funny that instead of everyone bigging up their API of choice (or normally slagging off the other one ) they just talk about how this will become a war. I suppose it still might but who knows.

My answer to the question:
The first 3D program I got to work was in OLG (from an NEHE tutorial), what I liked was the fact I hardly had to do anything to see something on the screen, it was simple, but I never went any futher. I always wanted to use DX, don''t ask why I just did for some reason, so I use that now.

I also thought I''d tell you my DX programming might come to an end soon because I''ve heard that new versions will not be supported but the Win9X operating system, I know they are shitty systems but I really don''t want to have anything to do with 2000 or XP (I tried 2K and I think they forgot to finish coding it ) and to me XP sound like the end of Microsoft for anyone who knows how to use a computer because they can see through the GUI and will see it as what it really is (a resource eating bug system), as of now Microsoft systems = Muppetsoft systems.

Bye

My personal pref. is OpenGL because I'm thinking of switching to linux and I don't want to totally rewrite my programs. Opengl and directx will both be around for a while, because directx is so popular but opengl has the heavyweight support of things like the Quake 3 engine.

It's basically your pick.

And, as everyone else is saying, please check the faq before asking "Which is better?"

Oh, and I forgot, there's no point in learning glide since upper end cards like Matrox and NVidia are the future. (And they don't use glide!)

Edited by - gph-gw on August 2, 2001 4:20:08 PM

Well ... I just wanted to say that if you are just writing an application level program (not a graphics engine or whatever) than you should NOT have to rewrite your whole program to switch between the two ... there are a few fundamental differences in their philosophy ... but in general ... if you write your c++ in a well organized fasion you can leave all modules dealing with anything but graphics and your world models untouched when you switch between the two ... otherwise your doing something wrong ... write all of your game logic code to deal with grpahics and physics on a purely abstract level and then they should never need to change ... even if you rendered the game in 2d sprites or as text boxes ...

Search the DirectX forum a bit if you really need to know. In any case, this had been argued so many times that there''s no reason for yet another thread, so I''m closing this.