I think I'll start off with a horror story about DX7 that happened to me a few days ago; I designed a game, and some demos using Blitz3D and DX7. And I have never had any problems with running them on any PC systems anywhere. But you know things go sometimes, I get to the "Black Technology Expo." on Saturday... I even have my own 3rd Day Studios display setup... but lo' and behold, I go to install my game on some of the 'older computers' that are there, they are WinXP systems, and guess what? They don't run!!! Had errors popping up all over the place! I am under the impression that if I had simply written these demo's in C++ and OpenGL that it would be much more native to Windows XP than DX is! I am seriously considering making a permanent switch to OpenGL. Which not only runs well on just about any Windows machine, but is even cross-platform, even to things like cell phones for that matter. I do appreciate DX being more than a 3D API like OpenGL, perhaps someone should design an "OpenEngine" or something... like DX but it's Open and based on OpenGL instead ya know... anyhow. That's what I think.

Here is a great site if you are wanting to learn OpenGL:
http://nehe.gamedev.net/

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I wanna die
And let You give
Your Life to me
So that I might live

i'd recommend upgrading to dx9, though i am typically not a MS guy, and there are few things of DX that grate me, i believe it is well designed and like the idea that new versions are indeed that new versions, and thus they designers have the oppurtunity to redesign the pipeline in accordance with more modern techniques and technology and card progress, actually with DX10 features, they are ahead of the game, making innovations that the card makers are then picking up.

Im sure you are able to distribute the dx redistributable with your game, and incorporate it into the install easy enough.

Karl

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Karl /GODCENTRIC
Visionary Media
the creative submitted to the divine.
Husband of my amazing wife Aleshia
Klumsy@xtra.co.nz

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I wanna die
And let You give
Your Life to me
So that I might live

For people interested in cross-platformability, I would recommend checking out SDL, Tao, and SdlDotNet.

--clint

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http://www.includingjudas.com/christiangame.html

I'm in the beginner-to-intermediate stage of learning/using OpenGL. I have basic vertices and shapes, textures, blending, and lighting under control - roughly the equivalent of up to lesson 8 on NeHe, although I did play with and tweak some of the other lessons. I also have some screen saver prototypes done using OpenGL, including rendering to a tiny preview window on an MFC dialog box.

I'm currently enrolled in the OpenGL course at http://www.gameinstitute.com but I'm finding that I have to read other sources (books, articles) to make any progress with it - it covers ground quite quickly without actually explaining the nitty-gritty details (apart from "look at the source code for this lesson for more details"). Has anyone else taken this course?

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Brian

I'd say I am still a beginner in OpenGL although it doesn't really seem that tough so far. It seems that the hard part will be designing the specifics of the game engine, such as the entity system, the collision, and those types of things. But the OpenGL rendering seems pretty much straight forward so far.

HanClinto, do you have a link for the SDL wrapper? It sounds quite interesting.. I am definitely into the cross-platform thing.

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I wanna die
And let You give
Your Life to me
So that I might live

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Vita sine Ieso est mors.
=Life without Jesus is death.

Sciuri non sunt boni edere.
=Squirrels are not good to eat.

The link for SDL in general is here:
http://www.libsdl.org/index.php

The link for SdlDotNet (which is what I use) is right here:
http://cs-sdl.sourceforge.net/

BTW, SdlDotNet just came out with a new version yesterday (Tuesday). They're making great progress, and they're very similar to being as complete of a game development library as PyGame is. I can testify from experience that it's a joy to code with SdlDotNet as it's so well organized and makes-sense.

Hope that helps some of y'all! To see a sample game I made with SdlDotNet, check it out at:
http://www.includingjudas.com/clint/AirLockedDemo.zip

It's not complete enough for me to put it up in the showcase, but you can fly around, and there's a small welding minigame in there. For the minigame, left-click to turn on the flame, right-click to feed in wire. The smallish gray panel in the upper-left is your welding area. The idea would be to make money by repairing holes in ship armor with this minigame, to have more of a player-skill based crafting engine.

I'll make a bigger post about this later when it's more complete, but if you want to add input into this game, now's a great time to do it.

You can mail me at hanclinto at gmail.com to talk to me about it.

Have fun!

In Christ,
clint

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http://www.includingjudas.com/christiangame.html

I'll try that demo. I don't currently have .NET installed, but I want to try your demo, so I'll get that as well. It sounds very interesting!

EDIT:
SDL seems to be just what I was looking for! Thanks again for the info and links!

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I wanna die
And let You give
Your Life to me
So that I might live

[This message has been edited by brandon (edited February 24, 2005).]

that sounds yummy
i didn't realise that SDL now also supports GL, when i used to follow SDL it was a 2d lib only.

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Karl /GODCENTRIC
Visionary Media
the creative submitted to the divine.
Husband of my amazing wife Aleshia
Klumsy@xtra.co.nz

I hope that I can use SdlDotNet with either Mono or Portable.NET (part of the DotGNU project, very similar to Mono, just less popular).

Portable.NET is here:
http://www.dotgnu.org/

I'm not sure if they're fully compatible at this point, but that's my hope, that Air Locked would be a cross-platform game through either Mono or Portable.NET.

--clint

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http://www.includingjudas.com/christiangame.html

To clarify one thing, SdlDotNet (and SDL) is a 2D library, but it can provide a surface to draw OpenGL objects. I have included a demo (the Gears demo) in SdlDotNet that shows this functionality. The demo uses SdlDotNet and Tao.OpenGl of the Tao Framework for the OpenGL stuff.

SdlDotNet runs on .NET, Mono on Linux and Mono on Windows.

Dave

You've done a great job with SdlDotNet so far, I'm quite impressed with it. I'm honored that you checked out my demo app -- thanks for the kind words!

Aaaah -- I was wondering how the gears demo worked.

I mean, I guess I could have just looked at the source and all, but I was more interested in other things. It was more of an idle curiosity.

--clint

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http://www.includingjudas.com/christiangame.html

[This message has been edited by HanClinto (edited March 04, 2005).]

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Brian

I believe they used OggVorbis/OpenAL as well. I am not 100% sure though.

Just checked, and both OpenAL and SDL were used.

[This message has been edited by HeardTheWord (edited March 07, 2005).]