Is this code worthy of flames? If so, why?

Whoa... What is wrong with this guy? He's very arrogant, patronizing and loves to preach about open-source like it's sacred.

Don't listen to him... He's a noob and it seems that he can't open the textures himself.

No offense blue to your choice in sites, but it seems people who join that site are snobbish like that. They all need a lesson in online ettiquette. Basically if you have nothing constructive to say, stfu. Post what you like and ignore the comments you don't like. That goes for any online blog.

I was going to flame you for using to many semi-colons


I wouldn't even bother with any further response to that dork. Though I don't understand programming, especially when it pertains to drawing graphics, I do just enough to be dangerous (even at work). and in my little small minuscule part of the programming world even I have found that there are multiple ways to get to the same spot. I applaud your efforts. Obviously that person has issues or is simply looking to poke you with a stick for fun.

1. Vista hates OpenGL.

2. Bloggers who actually read and take the time to reply to the comments are regarded as better bloggers... (at least I think they are) But yeah, don't even bother replying to comments like your flamer's, it's frustrating.

Vista Doesn't really support OpenGL it does so through another layer of software that interprets the code into Direct X 10. MS no longer allows the developement of drivers for OpenGL with Vista. They rolled Direct X into the OS to bundle out OpenGL support as it is competing with there Xbox 360 developement strategy. It's a political move to entice people to develope using only Direct X. They still hold a seat in the OpenGL developement group I hear, however they have really begun trying to turn the PC back into proprietary systems that you have to use their way and run their software only. This has been a long term goal (see Internet Explorer Outlook and numerous other bits of software they have bundled with there OS). Vista is merely a shell and there real products are things that cost you a lot more money.

Cyb

Vista supports OpenGL hardware acceleration. The main problem is ATi and Nvidia have yet to release decent drivers.

It emulates OpenGL using DirectX, which makes OGL accelerated emulators worth a lot less and emulate a lot slower than they should.

blueshogun96: Prepare yourself, OpenAL might also be eliminated (i.e. Windows 2008 will not allow unmanaged access to the sound drivers, but if you use XACT.... You see what I mean? Same principle)

xtra krazzy said:

It emulates OpenGL using DirectX, which makes OGL accelerated emulators worth a lot less and emulate a lot slower than they should.

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No, it emulates OpenGL when there's no installable client driver present. Microsoft don't provide an ICD with Vista, the hardware vendor (e.g. Nvidia or ATi) has to supply one. So if you install the latest driver package for your graphics card, everything is fine.

blueshogun96 said:

I heard that when in windowed mode, OpenGL is wrapped around Direct3D and uses pure OpenGL only in fullscreen mode.

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This sounds unreasonable though, because why utilize OGL in fullscreen but not in windowed mode? Furthermore, it also means that pure OGL in Vista DOES exist, and can be hacked in the program (i.e. make it think the window state is fullscreen or something assemblish of the sort)

Mantorok said:

Vista supports OpenGL hardware acceleration. The main problem is ATi and Nvidia have yet to release decent drivers.

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Microsofts word's on the subject

OpenGL

Windows Vista provides the same support as Windows XP for OpenGL, which allows video card manufactures to provide an installable client driver (ICD) for OpenGL that provides hardware-accelerated support; note that newer versions of such ICDs are required to fully support Windows Vista. If no ICD is installed, the system will fall back to the OpenGL v1.1 software layer in most cases.

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What you have to do to make said ICD work:

The OpenGL installable client driver (ICD) can obtain the same level of support for calling kernel-mode services as the Direct3D user-mode display driver. However, rather than gaining access to kernel-mode services through callback functions like the Microsoft Direct3D runtime supplies through the pAdapterCallbacks member of the D3DDDIARG_OPENADAPTER structure and the pCallbacks member of the D3DDDIARG_CREATEDEVICE structure, the OpenGL ICD must load Gdi32.dll and initialize use of the OpenGL-kernel-mode-accessing functions as shown in the following example.

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So the mechanisms are very different and there is a bit of a dichotomy in there.
Nothing is perfect that is a certainty. Backwards compatibilty obviously was jettisoned for several reasons, numerous API changes (DirectX 4-9 are mostly downward compatible with the prior versions) however there are billions (ok it's just hundreds) of compatibility bits they needed. DirectX was not well thought out as it's changed considerably from it's earliest inception. It would have been good if they included a Direct X wrapper program to run prior generation DirectX apps within that to translate into Vista. Much like using Virtual PC with hardware aceleration This only works as far as the DirectX API then comes win32 API support, I guess this was a cow they wanted to shoot quickly.
The emulation they provide is still only OpenGL 1.1. No hardware aceleration or translation into DirectX 10 was provided. OpenGL 1.1 compliance is software only.
There were numerous reasons for DirectX becoming part of the OS, again it was political mostly, this was easily fueled by the need for security (I've heard that before somewhere). ICD's do not have the same interface as Direct3D obviously (as noted in the 2nd quote) because they aren't part of the kernel. This makes developement of ICD's difficult at best (no reference).
I'm not convinced however decent OpenGL support will be easy to have and again all OpenGL programs must be made for Vista system (new binaries etc.) So prior generation games won't work.

Can anyone say Wine for Vista? My guess is that may be the only route to get the support for your old games (DirectX < 10) in Vista. As for OpenGL considering it's migrating to version 3 within the year (wow 2's life was really short by comparison to 1), there is little incentive for card manufacturers to write for a possibly changing API (new version of OGL) and a interface made of sand (IE it could change at any time we are talking about Microsoft here).

As ussual Microsoft makes something overly complicated. (ISO rejected one of the MS XML based proposed standards recently because ISO already had a nice standard that did the same thing instead of 4000 pages of documentation it had 80 pages of documentation.)

Cyb

So the mechanisms are very different and there is a bit of a dichotomy in there.

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Not to mention contrived. All this new bloat for supporting OGL natively on Vista. Oh hooray. It seems like they are making things difficult just so programmers can use DX9/10...which has much less fuss. :matrix:

I'm not convinced however decent OpenGL support will be easy to have and again all OpenGL programs must be made for Vista system (new binaries etc.)

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Oh jeez, MS must really be trying to kill off OGL for Vista. With all these extra loops. Whatever happened to just using things like they are now with XP?

As ussual Microsoft makes something overly complicated. (ISO rejected one of the MS XML based proposed standards recently because ISO already had a nice standard that did the same thing instead of 4000 pages of documentation it had 80 pages of documentation.)

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And this is why I'm not going to touch Vista in a long while...Too much hassle and non working things. Plus, all the efforts MS is taking to murder OGL over its Direct3D APIs.....:matrix: Makes my blood boil, to say the least.

Microsoft has always closely guarded it's code.
There reasons however are not what most people would think.
First it would mean critique of there programming interface etc. and this means 'negative' feedback. This has never been well recieved at MS.
Second the Microsoft would be open for suite. Vista visually is a clone of OS X much of it's functionality is borrowed from it as well. Suite from Apple (again) would likely be pending.

Third integration of Direct X may sound like it's for speed but it's not apparent really, it's a standard method of competing with MS uses (See IE and Netscape). They added a feature of using DirectX for the GDI as a reason for this, but it's not really apparent how much actually aceleration the standard drawing system makes use of DirectX. Obviously it has to make some.


As for the original author, see the thing about negative feedback. It's always good to check things that people point out. Without negative feedback things become unstable. If the guy is overly critical just reduce his influence on your work (IE ignore the ussual whining). Bottom line is if you can't see what he's complaining about then he's just making airy nothing.

Cyb