Hi neo,
> Any plans for open GL support within the V2-V3 ?
I would like to do this eventually, but it will take a fair amount of work to make it happen so I'm not quite sure when it will be.
Definitely not for v2 which I want to wrap up quite soon here.
For v3, I'm not sure yet, but it is rather unlikely to fit into there neither.
The main reason that MoI targets Direct3D rather than OpenGL is that the general driver quality is much higher on Windows for Direct3D drivers than OpenGL drivers. OpenGL drivers on Windows just tend to be somewhat more neglected and buggier unless you purchase the special "high end" video cards. Much of the time those expensive workstation cards actually have the exact same hardware as their lower priced gaming version, they just come with better OpenGL drivers.
Direct3D on the other hand is not separated into different levels of driver support by video card vendors, so that is kind of nice that you don't have to pay a lot more to get a stable driver for your card when using Direct3D.
OpenGL on the other hand is good to target for multi-platform use since it is available on a wider number of operating systems.
Unfortunately there are quite a few other systems in MoI that would actually be more difficult to port than the 3D display system, like the UI.
So just supporting OpenGL does not automatically mean that MoI would right after that be a native Mac or Linux application, there is a lot of other stuff to port that is actually more difficult than that.
In the meantime, several of the virtualization systems like VMWare and Parallels have started to support an emulation of Direct3D with their newer releases, so it is now possible to run a Direct3D application on a different operating system using one of these tools now. That's a relatively new development within the past couple of years.
- Michael
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