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Wine Devs Have Mixed Feelings Over Direct3D In Gallium3D

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  • Originally posted by BlackStar View Post
    I have worked on VR which is pretty much OpenGL-only. However, I've seen many people rely on D3D on other fields. Or even XNA (I can understand why, but ugh!)

    Research on 3d techniques is almost always done on D3D (probably because these techniques will be applied on games first).
    Matlab, Mathematica, IDL, DX. All heavy hitters in the scientific world. All OpenGL.

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    • Originally posted by Remco View Post
      Good luck with that. Why oh why does this project exist? http://code.google.com/p/angleproject/
      Because of Intel, Sis and Via, mainly.

      OpenGL users have been using Ati's tesselation features while Microsoft was still promoting D3D10 as the big revolution. Eventually it was standardized and beat into shape for D3D11 and OpenGL 4.0. Yes, standardization made it better. That's awesome.
      I don't recall any games making use of Ati's R600 tessellation features, though (at least outside of XBox360, which is D3D-only). I recall running Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind could make use of R200/R300-level tessellation, but that feature was removed on Catalyst 5.1 or so.

      Do prove me wrong if you have examples, but right now I feel it's kind of a moot point - noone was using hardware tessellation on the PC prior to D3D11.

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      • Originally posted by BlackStar View Post
        Because of Intel, Sis and Via, mainly.
        I thought so. But as a game publisher, you gotta target those as well. That's more than 50% of your market, if I'm remembering correctly. OpenGL just doesn't work for Windows.

        I don't recall any games making use of Ati's R600 tessellation features, though (at least outside of XBox360, which is D3D-only). I recall running Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind could make use of R200/R300-level tessellation, but that feature was removed on Catalyst 5.1 or so.

        Do prove me wrong if you have examples, but right now I feel it's kind of a moot point - noone was using hardware tessellation on the PC prior to D3D11.
        I honestly have no idea who uses what in their software. I think RTCW used TruForm, and that's all I know. I should have said "been able to use" instead. It's not a moot point though. It demonstrates that standards always come after features. Those "D3D11 features" were not pulled out of Bill Gates' ass. They were developed over years by many different companies, independently of any standard.

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        • Originally posted by Remco View Post
          I thought so. But as a game publisher, you gotta target those as well. That's more than 50% of your market, if I'm remembering correctly. OpenGL just doesn't work for Windows.
          OpenGL doesn't work on Linux either, at least for those targets (although Intel has gotten better lately). No Macs either, so you might as well use D3D and be done with it. Which brings as back to this discussion.

          I honestly have no idea who uses what in their software. I think RTCW used TruForm, and that's all I know. I should have said "been able to use" instead. It's not a moot point though. It demonstrates that standards always come after features. Those "D3D11 features" were not pulled out of Bill Gates' ass. They were developed over years by many different companies, independently of any standard.
          In which case, it doesn't matter that D3D is a Microsoft standard, as it exposes those exact features. I think I could live with that.

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          • Originally posted by Svartalf View Post
            Oh, the drivers sort of worked well enough with ndiswrapper (WINE for drivers, after a fashion...). They didn't do it out of the kindness of their little old black hearts- they did it because a majority stake holder told them to do it. I'll leave it as an exercise as to whom I might be referring to. If you're clever enough and your Google-fu is strong, you'll figure out whom that might be.
            I never said they did it out of the kindness of their hearts. The point is that it happened regardless of the existence of a Wine like technology.

            There are some individuals that claim that Wine hurts Linux because companies use it as an "excuse" to not port. There's little evidence of this. It certainly is not the Linux killer some are making it out to be.

            While you could claim that it's not beneficial, you could make the same claim about a lot of software available on Linux. I personally have no use for ham radio support, IBM Mainframe emulators, MFM hard drive support, Amiga support, and on and on. You won't find me trolling their users and developers, however.

            Some are yelling and screaming about vendor lock-in yet at the same time they are yelling and screaming about every technology that exists to break free of such a lock-in. Again the two rants are incompatible.

            OpenOffice, for example, can open Powerpoint and Word documents. The support is not perfect and is always going to be playing catch up (AKA the same lines used against Wine, Mono, etc). Does that mean that having such support is not worth while or that the OpenOffice developers are evil Microsoft supremacists? No. It means that they recognize that a large portion would be users are going to require such support. First get them using your software, and users will gravitate toward the open formats which are first class citizen with the software.

            Compatibility, be it source, binary, format, or protocol compatibility is a necessary part of adoption and migration. It's especially true if you're the underdog. No, it's not 100% perfect, but nothing is.

            I don't really understand why people are complaining about "direction Linux should be heading" when the direction is from Windows to Linux. It may not be cold turkey from no free to all free, but some free is a step in the right direction.

            If Linux gains enough popularity, things like Wine and D3D will fade off into obscurity as the second class citizens they are. Microsoft won't have the relevance it does today and the better preforming "native" solutions will dominate.

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            • Originally posted by BlackStar View Post
              OpenGL doesn't work on Linux either, at least for those targets (although Intel has gotten better lately). No Macs either, so you might as well use D3D and be done with it. Which brings as back to this discussion.
              I agree that you can consider OpenGL to be broken on Linux at the moment. It works for me, but a game company will have to deal with crappy drivers. But don't lose hope: companies like VMware, Red Hat and AMD are fixing it. D3D10 on Linux is even more broken, because you can actually rely on the fact that it *doesn't* work.

              In which case, it doesn't matter that D3D is a Microsoft standard, as it exposes those exact features. I think I could live with that.
              Yes, OGL and D3D are pretty much the same thing when it comes to features. On a personal note, D3D has that awful Microsoft sauce, so I'm not touching it except for compatibility with Windows. And the Wine devs will continue with their OpenGL backend for technical reasons, so my guess is I won't be using the D3D state tracker for compatibility either.

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              • Originally posted by Jimmy View Post
                OpenOffice, for example, can open Powerpoint and Word documents. The support is not perfect and is always going to be playing catch up (AKA the same lines used against Wine, Mono, etc). Does that mean that having such support is not worth while or that the OpenOffice developers are evil Microsoft supremacists? No. It means that they recognize that a large portion would be users are going to require such support. First get them using your software, and users will gravitate toward the open formats which are first class citizen with the software.
                Do you know the story behind OpenOffice?

                It was a rather irrelevant closed-source office suite. Then Microsoft really pissed off a major player (as it often happens) through underhanded deals and their monopolist dealings. So the major player bought StarOffice and made it open to screw with Microsoft and hurt the business of MS Office. They still fund many of the developers, though other heavyweights who hate Microsoft have stepped in and are funding it heavily.

                It didn't really work, as MS Office is pretty much as strong as it used to be. But we got a nice office suite in the meantime (it was pretty horrible back then). In any case, the only reason why OpenOffice is, well, open, is to kill Microsoft.

                If Linux gains enough popularity, things like Wine and D3D will fade off into obscurity as the second class citizens they are. Microsoft won't have the relevance it does today and the better preforming "native" solutions will dominate.
                This would be great.

                But Direct3D will not make people migrate to Linux.

                We've implemented the following so far:

                - FAT support
                - NTFS support
                - SMB support
                - Win API support (WINE)
                - MS Office documents support (OOo)
                - "Microsoft HTML" support (Gecko+Webkit)
                - Mono / .Net support
                - Silverlight / Moonlight support
                - WMA/WMV/AVI support

                ...and where are all the people? Still using Windows. You think that they'll switch becasue of Direct3D? Or that THIS is what all the major companies are waiting for? Nah, they don't give a crap, and just like they don't bother programming cross-platform stuff right now, they won't bother programming cross-platform stuff even if Direct3D is available.

                I don't think so. We don't really need it, IMHO. Like Wine, it's OK if it helps people interoperate, but it won't bring people to Linux. Open Standards will bring people to Linux, together with continued work on improving and polishing the system, the hard way as until now. We need clean HTML, open document format, OpenGL, supported widely. That's what we need, and we need to continue promoting these things. THEN it will be easy to switch to Linux, not after we rewrite Windows 98 from scratch, and MS gets everyone to switch to MS Windows 2015. They'll just keep lockign people into their NEW formats and we'll be chasing them instead of making a decent system.

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                • No! Microsoft has not been succesful getting people locked into more recent tech, other than the Win API, including DirectX.

                  Examples of failure:
                  -live/bing
                  -zune
                  -Silverlight
                  -docx (google indexes more odf, no realy!)
                  -IE7 and IE8
                  -windows mobile
                  -windows tabletpc
                  -hddvd backing on the Xbox360
                  -msn music
                  -SCO (yeah :') )
                  -what did I forget?

                  Make no mistake; their marketshare _is_ declining!

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                  • Uhhh... OpenGL isn't broken on windows because of MS. ATI and nVidia provide their own implementation of OpenGL, which in ATIs case AFAIK shares a lot of code with the linux implementation. Don't know much about nVidia or other hardware vendors, so I won't comment on that.

                    Only new versions of the D3D API are "run" my Microsoft, because guess what? It's an API! It's not supposed to change, and it doesn't.

                    And what the hell is on your mind when you say that when D3D12 comes out it's going to be the end of the world? Did we just lose our hands here? Are we now unable to code another state tracker that solves the problem? Oh yeah, I forgot, if it's Microsoft that thought of D3D12 than it's evil and will eat your kids! Don't follow them even if it means we have to be tortured to death!

                    And yeah, MS may not be a "full of love" company, and that's not what I said. You're having serious interpretation problems if you can't manage to understand what I meant by "they're given love there". Seriously, should we write things in a formal language readable only by lawyers here to get a point across?

                    We're talking about an API here! Header files! Some defined "protocol" of talking to a graphics driver, why are we all crying over this like it has life of it's own and it's gonna eat you inside-out?

                    As I said before, I'm not saying D3D is the solution to all our problems. I'm just begging to stop being tortured by OpenGL and give me some decent cross-platform API. If currently that means we have to stick with D3D11, I'll be more than happy to do so. I'll worry about D3D12 when it comes out.

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                    • To clarify:
                      By "new versions of the D3D API" I mean unreleased ones. As soon as they release it, it's a fixed API. When some change occurs, we have a new version of the API.

                      Remember: the API comes with no implementation whatsoever that could get us in trouble.

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