zlacker

It wasn't just graphics, it was audio as well. People have it nice now but back then you were still fighting audio driver issues. AC'97 support made that situation livable but it took forever for everyone to support it.

>>nekoas+(OP)
My opinion on this one, for games authors anyway, was changed by reading an early 2000s piece by someone rebutting a lot of the noise Carmack was making on the topic, focusing on exactly this point: by DirectX 6, you got an API that was a suite which gave you, yes, the graphics, but also the sound, the input handling, media streaming for cutscenes and so on. OpenGL vs Direct3D was a sideshow at that point for most developers: it was "solves one part of their problem" vs "solves all of their problems". And no-one involved in OpenGL showed any sign of being interested in those other problems.

>>rodger+PX
I haven't played much with either OpenGL or DirectX but I remember wanting to render some text using a 3D API - DirectX supports it out of the box (need to pick the font etc - lots of settings) but at least when I last looked, OpenGL didn't offer that functionality, so I'd need to find a library that handles font loading and everything else associated with printing text.

>>rodger+PX
Well yeah, I mean, OpenGL (to quote Wikipedia) is "a cross-language, cross-platform API for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics" - nothing more, nothing less. Whereas DirectX (which includes and is often conflated with Direct3D) was specifically designed by Microsoft to attract game developers to their platform (and lock them in) by taking care of all their needs. So it's kind of an apples to oranges comparison...

>>rodger+PX
Input handling was pretty basic back in the day, there wasn't that many different hardware options to support.

For audio everyone was using 3rd party tools like Miles Sound System etc., but even OpenAL launched around 2000 already as an OpenGL companion. Video had the same thing happen with everyone using Bink which launched around 1999.

In comparison using OpenGL was a lot nicer than anything before probably DirectX 9. At that time in DX you needed pages and pages of boilerplate code just to set up your window, nevermind to get anything done.

Advanced GPU features of the time were also an issue, OpenGL would add them as extensions you could load, but in DirectX you were stuck until the next release.

>>animal+sf2
You can't make a window in open gl itself at all...

>>tubs+ex2
Yeah... you need egl.