I played around with OpenGL a bit years ago, before shaders. I was just wondering, given the latest advancements in both OpenGL and DirectX APIs (and particularly DirectX for gaming), would it be possible to make an OpenGL port of Skyrim? Would it look and perform comparably?

I'm curious why games don't take this route anymore as a means of bringing support to other platforms (Linux, Mac). I understand there's more code involved to access things like peripherals and sound, but there are plenty of libraries for that.

MS is to blame. They make it easy for developers to use DirectX, they make it difficult to use OpenGL. They have less control over OpenGL games than they do with DirectX games so they prefer people to develop using DirectX for their OS.

In other words, MS hates open standards, always has.

Winehq gives Skyrim a gold rating, so Skyrim works under wine. As the graphics libraries in wine use OpenGL, it is pretty oblivous that it is fully possible to use OpenGL for Skyrim. However, it would be a lot of work to redesign and reprogram the game engine using OpenGL. And I am not sure how well OpenGL performs compared to DirectX in terms of flops, ease of use, robustness and all the other important parameters.

Oh, and what CCNA said.

What CCNA said.

Sigh. d on a "What X said"? Heheh.

Do you know in what ways they make it difficult for OpenGL programmers? Do they intentionally gimp the OpenGL implementation in Windows?

I wouldn't say that they gimped OpenGL, they have no real way to. What they did do is make parts of Direct3D have access to things in unique ways that OpenGL cannot do due to not having a handbook on WIndows implementations. They then heavily incentivized using Direct3D to game developers.

Also, OpenGL is just a 2D/3D graphics API, whereas DirectX is a whole multimedia and gaming API. It isn't right to compare OpenGL to DirectX. DirectX vs SDL or DirectX vs the Open*L family (though that's a bit of a misnomer since there is no cohesive body of Open*L, just different companies releasing stuff as Open*L to make it clear that it is an open implementation) makes more sense.

woooooooo.................................openGL, AI, DirectX,SDL, Open*L, Direct 3D

I thought I was reading my 16 year old's text messages again lol

Excuse my numptyness but what games use OpenGL?

An incomplete list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OpenGL_programs

And from the DB: http://www.opengl.org/products/search_results/

I'm not sure which blockbuster titles use it currently. A few years ago it was quite common, particularly with iD Software. All the Quake series and DOOM III was using OpenGL I believe.

Also, any game that runs on Mac or Linux I think would use it since DirectX isn't an option for those.

Thanks! I didn't realize there was so many.



In that list, I saw RAGE and FarCry

Edit; got ninja'd edit. Damn my slow Internet-fu!

That's right- I forgot that WoW has an OpenGL renderer.

Indeed;

I'm saddened that it's a political / business reason that more developers aren't using OpenGL as opposed to a technical reason. At least as a technical limitation it would have a better chance of being overcome.

If I'm not to much mistaken, PS3 uses a dialect of OpenGL.

For-profit technology companies have always used standards as a battleground in one way or another (yes, all of them). MS just happened to target gaming. They're not solely to blame, either. nVidia contributed to (and benefited greatly from) the preferential treatment of Direct3D over open standards like OpenGL and other popular proprietary APIs like Glide. Companies like Creative bullied the industry for years with proprietary APIs (including MS) until the new Windows HAL finally cut EAX off at the knees, forcing them to adopt a (gasp) more open standard.