In the words of John Carmack:

"It has been pretty clearly demonstrated that the mac market is barely viable and the linux market is not viable for game developers to pursue. Linux ports will be done out of good will, not profit motives. From an economic standpoint, a developer is not making a bad call if they ignore the existence of all platforms but windows. "

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Original post by Jx
Windows 95 sucks.
Windows 98 is kinda ok.
Windows ME sucks.
Windows 2000 rules.

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Win95 is faster and more stable than win98, and runs all the same apps/games/drivers. It doesnt have activedesktop neither, which is another good point for it. Win98 is much worse than win95.

Same Article by John Carmack
"I''m still developing everything with OpenGL, and I''m still targeting mac and linux as well as windows"

Even the great John Carmack does it.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster
Please don''t be elitist, there is a little system out there called the macintosh.

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You got that right. A little system...

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As a developer from strangeflavor(strangeflavor.com) said at the idevgames.com forum(about directX):
"In the long run though, it''s just a case of waiting for X-Box to fail and take the DirectX games market with it, as Direct X is *only* used on Windows boxes (OpenGL is useable on most systems and consoles in some form or other), a failed X Box campain (X Box will decimate the PC Games market) could easily backfire for Direct X.".

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OpenGL is not common on consoles. Ubisoft wrote their own OpenGL for PS2. Read the linked article for what went right and wrong with this tool. I do not know of OpenGL for any other console except XBox, but that is basically just a PC in a set-top unit. A common fallacy that DirectX is no more than a graphics API. Uninformed people keep comparing DirectX against OpenGL when they should be comparing Direct3D against OpenGL. DirectInput, DirectSound, DirectPlay and the other modules that comprise DirectX along with Direct3D should all be considered on their own merits.

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"Windows is 90% of the market, but a game for Windows sells less than 5% of what is does on any of the other consoles. (due to a flooded PC games market , not all Windows machines being used for games, or being fast enough for the latest games and there being a *lot* of consoles out there).
A DirectX game will possibly sell more than a MacOS game, but it will sell a lot less than an OpenGL written game that can be easily transfered to Windows, MacOS, Nintendo, X-Box and at a push Playstation 2."

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Portability. I wish it was all that simple. As John Carmack says below, Macintosh and Linux markets are not viable in a business sense because games do not sell in those markets. Porting a DirectX game to XBox will be fairly simple. Porting a game to PlayStation 2 or Nintendo GameCube will require a lot more work. Specifically, the lack of a common API (OpenGL is not widely supported on consoles in contrast to what this Mac developer would have you believe) and the need for speed requires developers go to the metal on consoles. Each console supports different features, eg. PS2 has single-pass texturing and GameCube has eight-pass texturing, so a generic API will not take advantage of the best each system has to offer.

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So remeber, it''s not only the system you chose, it''s the technology you use, how portable will it be? This will determine the market value of your game. If you''re looking for free tools and people willing to help the macintosh has those(Apple gives away a free compiler called MPW). And as said above, if you use DirectX on a windows machine you are limited. If you use OpenGl(available on many platforms) you can increase your market value.

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Quote from John Carmack in this post on the Slashdot forums (linked on GDNet front page as well)...

It has been pretty clearly demonstrated that the mac market is barely viable and the linux market is not viable for game developers to pursue. Linux ports will be done out of good will, not profit motives. From an economic standpoint, a developer is not making a bad call if they ignore the existence of all platforms but windows.

Portability is over-rated. Develop on the system that you intend to distribute on. If developing for Windows, then Windows 2000 is very good choice. Console development kits usually include tools that run on the Windows platform. So Windows may suck, and I think most people would agree with you, but you cannot find a more widely supported platform.


Steve ''Sly'' Williams  Code Monkey  Krome Studios

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Original post by coelurus
You mentioned Linux, and I think you should try it if you''d like to. It''s not very different from Windows programming, just that it''s a bit safer, no reboots, no blue screens etc. Atlest, I haven''t seen any...

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You are right, no blue screens are seen, coz there aren''t any. I just end up having to press the reset button.

No reboots ? I have seen a lot of reboots in it especially with X.

Safer ? I am really lost here. Could you please explain how.

And I have to agree with Sly, you cannot find a wider supported platform.

I really think the OGL and DX wars have gone way out of the line. Isn''t it just a matter of preference as to what is good. A lot of people end up giving a biased opinion of the 2. I would really like to hear an unbiased opinion of the two API''s from someone who has used both :-).

Well, I''ve used Linux. I used it quite extensivly over the last few years, but I find that after a while I end up using windows anyway. I mean, Linux is good, but I seem to find that I''m installing all the latest version of gnome and X and E and all that more than I''m actually doing anything productive. I guess that''s really my fault. I mean, there''s no reason why I can''t just stick with an older version while it''s working. Anyway, the other reason I use windows is that I find that''s no less stable than linux. I''ve had my computer running for about 2 weeks straight in windows 2000 without any reboots whatsoever. I realise that there is people who have had linux boxes up for months or even years, but the only reason I ever reboot is if I install new software (which I admit is one of the annoying things about windows) or hardware. In fact, the reason I shutdown last time was because there was a pretty bad electrical storm and I figured I should unplug everything

Also, I''ve used DirectX and OpenGL. My current project (War Worlds - NB this site will be moving soon, check out here for info) is being written in OpenGL, but I started out with Direct3D. The last re-write was done entirely in DirectX, but I thought I''d try opengl for once, and I must say, I like it better. I still use DirectInput and DirectSound and all that, but my 3D is now OpenGL. Maybe it was because I was already quite familiar with 3D concepts when I started teh OpenGL version, but I found it much faster getting something up and running, and was quite trivial for me to add new features. Though I think for 2D stuff, Direct3D wins hands down.

Anyway, that''s just my opinion. Feel free to disagree.

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War Worlds - A 3D Real-Time Strategy game in development.

I use BeOS for development, targeting Linux, BeOS and Windows (maybe Mac, but if ASM involved...), and win2k for testing under windows.

Use the system you prefer and that is the most stable (either BeOS or a *nix).

-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-

"I do not know of OpenGL for any other console except XBox"

You can use OpenGL on PS2 and Game Cube. For PS2, it is not perfect, but the GC SDK is made with OpenGL...

There is no perfect OS, but I use MacOS, Win2k and Linux. They are all too big, but work fine.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster
I would really like to hear an unbiased opinion of the two API''s from someone who has used both :-).

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You should really check out idevgames.com more often. A news article from idevgames gives you three websites that compare the two:
http://www.xmission.com/%7Elegalize/d3d-vs-opengl.html
http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/windoze/OpenGLvsDirect3D.html
http://extra.gamespot.co.uk/pc.gamespot/hardware/dirx7_uk/review.html

I don''t know how unbiased they are.

> Portability is over-rated. Develop on the system that you intend to distribute on

Wrong, that''s the worst way to go.

It is absolutely correct that Linux isn''t a viable target platform for games (yet). But it is the best devel platform available on the PC.
Developping a huge project under Windows is suicide, even under Win2k, you won''t believe how frustrating (and unproductive) it can be, if you can''t hold the deadline because of a bugged OS. Linux is *ways* more stable than *any* available Windows version, if properly configured.

About the security point mentioned somewhere above: it might not be important to a single amateur developer, but if you work with a team using an intranet or even the internet to share sources and other ''sensitive'' material amongst your devel team, then never trust Windows, if you are not interested in finding the sources of your brandnew game spread all over the internet free to download for everyone. This is meant by security.

And to all those who always cry that Windows 2k or XP or whatever is oh-so-stable, because they ran it x weeks without a crash: Did you ever tried to use Maya, Softimage or similar with a 3D scene taking 3GB of RAM or more and the full load of a quad-CPU machine ? I can tell you, from my own personal experience: ''runtime error xxx'', ''System exception xxx (crash)'', ''(Bluescreen) whatever-weird-MS-error'', ''Exception in kernel32.dll, system halted'', just a plain lockup w/o any message, and so on...

We use Linux boxes for the programming (using a cross compiler to get Windows compatible excutables), two Win98 + 2k machines to test the game, and an SGI Onyx2 (running Irix 7) for the 3D modelling.

This is the nice thing about an OpenGL game: you can code it on a stable OS (Linux, Irix, perhaps Mac-OS) and get Windows compatibility for free.
Normal users are forced to fight with Windows, we developpers have the choice, why would we take the hard way if there is a excellent (and free !) alternative available ?

Alex