Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/09/03/14:50:08
Well, I suppose I should apologize for that last article. I wasn't trying to
say D3D was superior than OpenGL and nor was I trying to sound like I'm an
expert in the subject. I did, in all honesty, read through most of the OpenGL
spec which I got from DEC, which might be difficult to believe given my
comment about no Immediate Mode OpenGL (which someone -- Paul
Shirley -- gratefully pointed out, as well as calling my article bs, which is
mostly true as well) -- however, for some reason it was my impression that
there was no parallel to the DrawPrimitives in OpenGL. Can someone clear me
up on this? Really, I did read most of the OpenGL spec; but it seems to me it
used codestreams to define polys and such, which isn't the same thing as
calling a function to ``draw a poly here, based on data here'' which is what
I am used to thinking in. I am well aware there is no Retained mode in OpenGL
and as I said in the previous article I think Retained mode is not such a
great idea. I suppose I put my foot in my mouth, then the other. Landed on my
ass.
However, the post was originally a reply to someone saying Win95 was no good
for low-level API, and don't really think this is fair. DirectX doesn't seem
bad at all, really -- if you can forgive the 33 meg SDK download, and of
course there is more than just D3D. I understand some of the weaknesses of
D3D, and while this isn't a fair comparison at all, Win95+D3D beats out
X11+Mesa on my non-3D-accellerated non-fpu 486.
Other comments that were made re X11 were sort of random, I know that it is
far technically superior, especially considering it is built on Linux;
however I still think it is ugly -- primarily because there is no set
standard for it's look and feel; e.g., Netscape looks a whole lot different
than many other apps which have the plain old b/w look -- is this Xaw? --
which I don't really mind, actually I find netscape's interface much uglier.
I feel kind of stupid writing this letter; I'm not really so arrogant to
think I made any kind of impact with my little rant, I just felt sort of out
of place making the comments I did. I am a big fan of djgpp and am developing
a 3D api (something like Plush, I imagine) which will suit my needs and have
ports for djgpp+Allegro, CygWin32+DirectX, and probably also gcc+Mesa (X86
Linux at least). In that order. So my experience with 3D is pretty limited,
however I am an excellent C++ programmer and don't usually make such fool-ass
posts as that last one.
- Calvin -
- Raw text -