Serious Sam 2 Tech Demo on ATI Rxxx (DirectX & Ati booth

[Arun]

both ATI's and Microsoft's DirectX booths

Implication being that they've dropped OpenGL as the primary development platform in favour of DirectX?

I can confirm that.
They most definitively are NOT giving up on OpenGL though. It's just because of the XBox, the slow rate at which OpenGL is evolving, ... they just decided to focus on DX this time around. An OpenGL version of the engine most definitively IS to be released simultaneously.

Uttar

 

[Colourless]

His problem is having to call wglGetProcAddress() to get function pointers to the Multitexture, and other GL1.2 additions.

 

[oddfellow]

Can't wait for this one. The pics were enough to make me drool even though they were low quality. I loved both the first games immensely.

I hope they get a few licences out of this engine, going by their previous work I'd say they deserve to make a few extra bucks out of their tech, which is top notch.
Incidentally, does anyone know if their previous serious engine's were licenced to anyone? Will Rock looked pretty similar, but I'm not sure if the serious engine was used

 

[Tahir2]

This game looks great, like a cartoon. I loved the original games and it's refreshing to see people talk beyond HL2 and Doom 3 once in a while

As for the effects, Croteam are known for pushing a lot of polygons in bright open spaces with a lot of detail and fluidly on even modest hardware. I cannot wait to try this out on my new NVxx or Rxxx.

 

[EasyRaider]

But this is not the topic, back on OpenGL under Windows the part that is really frustrating is having to load extensions that are part of OpenGL core since 1.2 like Multitexturing, 3D textures etc... MS promised some years ago to update Windows GL driver but we're still stuck to GL1.1 level. This part of the driver is tied with the Windows OS so MS is the only one that can update it.

I do find this curious...but I think we're talking about two different things. Does MS driver structure prevent promoting vendor specific extensions to ARB extensions?

There are vendor specific extensions, ARB extensions and then there is core OpenGL. Vendor specific extensions can be promoted to ARB, but ARB extensions cannot be promoted to core GL under Windows. I (and probably many others) suspect MS is holding OpenGL back at 1.1 to promote DirectX.

Anyway, that's how I have understood it. I could be wrong.

 

[Fodder]

Incidentally, does anyone know if their previous serious engine's were licenced to anyone? Will Rock looked pretty similar, but I'm not sure if the serious engine was used

Alpha Black Zero, Nitro Family and Serious Sam: The Next Encounter. Will Rock was just a ripoff.

 

[Sxotty]

More like greedy...HEY...MS has all this money...let's just steal some. It's a farce.

I have to say one thing.

I saw an interview where someone actually said this "Media player is much better than anything else out there and it is free therefore no one willl buy competing products." He then proceeded to say that since it was better it was unfair and MS should be punished for bundling it. That was his actual argument I was rolling on the floor. I actually sympathize with certain arguments against MS, but when they are that lame well it is a farce as Joe said.

In any case SS was cool, and fun and I am sure SS2 will be as well... of course it has no plot or anything (not that I minded), but it is still good fun .

 

[Humus]

2 minutes of shaky-cam. They say they'll have a high-res high-quality capture soon.

http://files.seriouszone.com/download.php?fileid=866

 

[Xigen]

both ATI's and Microsoft's DirectX booths

Implication being that they've dropped OpenGL as the primary development platform in favour of DirectX?

I can confirm that.
They most definitively are NOT giving up on OpenGL though. It's just because of the XBox, the slow rate at which OpenGL is evolving, ... they just decided to focus on DX this time around. An OpenGL version of the engine most definitively IS to be released simultaneously.

Uttar

Pardon my ignorance, but what is the point of developing their engine for two api's? If my memory serves me correctly, Epic do this as well. I understand that supporting OGL as well means the engine can work on Mac and Linux platforms, but is this not too small a market to make all the extra development work feasible? Or is it either very straight forward to do entailing little extra work (I assume this is not the case), or gives some additional benefits I have not mentioned?

 

[StealthHawk]

Yeah, I have the same question. Instead of doing both OGL and D3D, why not just use OGL only and be done with it? It's not like any serious vendors don't have a decent OGL ICD at this stage. And I would think that it would cut down on the work.

 

[Althornin]

Yeah, I have the same question. Instead of doing both OGL and D3D, why not just use OGL only and be done with it? It's not like any serious vendors don't have a decent OGL ICD at this stage. And I would think that it would cut down on the work.

Xbox???

 

[StealthHawk]

Yeah, I have the same question. Instead of doing both OGL and D3D, why not just use OGL only and be done with it? It's not like any serious vendors don't have a decent OGL ICD at this stage. And I would think that it would cut down on the work.

Xbox???

That does makes sense for newer games, but what about older ones like Half-Life or Serious Sam/Serious Sam:SE?

 

[KimB]

There are vendor specific extensions, ARB extensions and then there is core OpenGL. Vendor specific extensions can be promoted to ARB, but ARB extensions cannot be promoted to core GL under Windows. I (and probably many others) suspect MS is holding OpenGL back at 1.1 to promote DirectX.

Anyway, that's how I have understood it. I could be wrong.

I definitely agree. Why else would Microsoft continue to only expose OpenGL 1.1? I mean, we may not expect them to release new patches with updated OpenGL versions, but MS definitely should be updating OpenGL with the release of new OS's.

And yet they don't. If you do any OpenGL programming under other OS's, you'll notice quickly that they do regularly update GL version support.

 

[Fodder]

what about older ones like Half-Life

Valve were formed from ex-MS employees who were chummy with Bill & co, but at the time OGL was still far superior.

 

[KimB]

Valve were formed from ex-MS employees who were chummy with Bill & co, but at the time OGL was still far superior.

I think it instead comes from the fact that they were using a modified Quake/Quake 2 engine. Note that they did add a Direct3D renderer, but were unable to get its performance as high as OpenGL.

 

[Arun]

Pardon my ignorance, but what is the point of developing their engine for two api's? If my memory serves me correctly, Epic do this as well. I understand that supporting OGL as well means the engine can work on Mac and Linux platforms, but is this not too small a market to make all the extra development work feasible? Or is it either very straight forward to do entailing little extra work (I assume this is not the case), or gives some additional benefits I have not mentioned?

As Epic says, OGL and D3D are now fundamentally the same thing - it's just different ways to expose advanced features, and different function names. That means if you do an ENGINE for your game, like both Croteam and Epic do, then it's not that much work to convert it from one API to the other.
However, unless you put quite a bit of time into it, you're likely not to get as good performance as with the primary API. Actually, I believe that's another reason why Croteam now uses D3D as their primary API: when they converted Serious Sam 1 from OGL to D3D, performance was great, sometimes even better!

As for why you'd want to support OGL too - I assume it's mostly for the non-Windows markets. Plus, it always makes your product look more professional if you support different platforms IMO.


Uttar

 

[KimB]

As Epic says, OGL and D3D are now fundamentally the same thing - it's just different ways to expose advanced features, and different function names. That means if you do an ENGINE for your game, like both Croteam and Epic do, then it's not that much work to convert it from one API to the other.

That was stated a while ago. GLSL is a significant departure from what is available in DirectX. There are also different performance characteristics, and features are implemented differently and at a different pace.

Previously, there were also significant differences in how certain features were exposed. For example, many shaders in OpenGL in the "DirectX 8" era were written in a command-line format. Only with nVidia's texture shader extensions, at the time, could you write assembly instructions directly (note that with nVidia's extensions, texture shaders were separate from register combiners. The texture shader handled all calculations dealing with texture addressing, while the register combiner was basically a math processor. The register combiner was executed after the texture shader...PS 1.1-1.4 combined the two into one pixel shader).

As for a performance difference between the two, when I did some tests with Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2003, OpenGL was always faster on my GeForce4, whereas Direct3D was always faster on the Radeon 9700 Pro.

 

[Fodder]

Valve were formed from ex-MS employees who were chummy with Bill & co, but at the time OGL was still far superior.

I think it instead comes from the fact that they were using a modified Quake/Quake 2 engine. Note that they did add a Direct3D renderer, but were unable to get its performance as high as OpenGL.

1. Why add a D3D renderer when they had a perfectly sufficient OGL one? Because they had a close relationship with Microsoft.
2. Why keep the OGL renderer after coding a D3D one? Because at the time, OGL was still far superior.

That's my take. Development on the game was way behind schedule, it's not like they had time to arse around with extra features simply for the sake of user choice.


The other bonus is engine licensing, supporting both APIs gives you that extra little bit of cash magnetism.

 

[jb]

As for a performance difference between the two, when I did some tests with Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2003, OpenGL was always faster on my GeForce4, whereas Direct3D was always faster on the Radeon 9700 Pro.

Keep in mind that in UT2003 there are a number of features that are NOT supported in the OpenGL path. For example RenderToTexture() which does those moving scoreboard or writes the name of the player on the Licenses plates. Not sure if it will make much/any diff, still something to be aware of....

 

[no_way]

Pardon my ignorance, but what is the point of developing their engine for two api's? If my memory serves me correctly, Epic do this as well. I understand that supporting OGL as well means the engine can work on Mac and Linux platforms, but is this not too small a market to make all the extra development work feasible?

On a related note, has anyone seen a recent side-by-side objective comparison of two API's ?