Concrete Examples

OK, so lots of people have said OGL needs to catch up with DX.

Can anybody provide concrete examples of what it’s missing, apart from a high version number?

Yes, we’re also desperately in need of glitzy marketing, vacuous press releases and a logo that looks like somebody sneezed while chewing crayons.

Seriously, the one thing we desperately need is render-to-texture (or at least framebuffer-to-texture pixel transfers that are fast enough to use in realtime). Otherwise, I’d be happy to just see all of 1.2 implemented in hardware. (3d texturing and texture borders in particular.) Per-pixel effects like bumpmapping should migrate into the core API at some point, but I don’t think they’re settled enough yet.

Slightly offtopic, but I’ve been wondering… does anybody even remotely connected with the ARB still read these boards? On the old BBs somebody used to drop in occasionally to reassure everyone to that effect, but no more. I suspect we’d see more serious posts (and less of the whinges) in this thread if there was any indication that anybody was listening.

Direct3D provides vertex blending. OpenGL does not.

I found this from a link off of OpenGL.org page…

You want vertex blending?
GL_EXT_vertex_weighting - available on TNT and GeForce (at least).

[War3ChatHost] Why the decision not to have OpenGL as a 3D acceleration choice?

[War3DevTeam] Direct3D is a much better choice for our game because we do skinned, skeletal animation on our units. OpenGL in its current form really can’t support hardware transformation and lighting on those types of units.

Usually 3D game uses DirectX quite a lot:
DirectSound for (surprise ) sound,
DirectInput for user input,
DirectPlay for network,
DirectDraw for 2D stuff…
So, Direct3D is a “natural” choice.

[This message has been edited by Serge K (edited 07-22-2000).]

I was going for this:

Originally posted by ngill:

[War3DevTeam] …OpenGL in its current form really can’t support hardware transformation and lighting on those types of units.

But who can explain, what does it mean - “THOSE types of units”???

I am not sure… but maybe you could find out at www.blizzard.com/war3 ?