Crysis Q&A
Cry Freedom on GamesIndustry.biz is a Q&A with Crytek's Michael Khaimzon, asking the Crysis lead artist about next-generation tech development, his London Game Career Fair speech, the possibility of console development and working with EA vs Ubisoft.
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uglysad
replyI was excited about Crysis. It looks amazing.
On the other hand, you need Direct X 10 which is Vista only (so I've been told) and I'm not going to buy a $500 OS to play a game. It just isn't going to happen.
On the plus side, he mentions bringing it to the next Gen Consoles is not out of the question. I guess I can always play it there. :)-
As far as I know the game is shipping with DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 renderers, so at the very least XP will be supported. I don't know if Windows 2000 support is being actively deprecated by developers yet, but there's the chance that it might work, too. Crysis isn't worth using Vista, and I don't particularly care about DirectX 10. When I think of how Microsoft could have benefited the world of 3D graphics at large by investing in OpenGL instead of their own proprietary solution I get a little sick...
But that's neither here nor there. You'll probably be able to play the thing.-
Huh. Why hasn't OpenGL surpassed DX?
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OpenGL's approach to growth of feature set is slower and prone to much more debate than Microsoft's top-down architectural design. On the one hand, it's slower and more prone to fragmentation because, until a standard is reached, vendors offer their own extensions as a method of using the functionality on their card. In the mean time, developers write for the extensions that are available, and this can cause some messiness in terms of code maintainability. On the other hand, when it's mature it's generally rock-solid, and the extension mechanism allows you to take advantage of hardware capabilities which aren't necessarily exposed in DirectX. A frequent complaint about DirectX is that it pretends that hardware of a given generation is the same even when drastic differences exist in their abilities (see the GeforceFX versus Radeon R300 series as an example). DirectX is also updated from time to time to deal with this (see DirectX 8.1, which is basically a sort of "DirectX Radeon 8500 Edition").
The main reason it hasn't surpassed DirectX is that Microsoft harps on using DirectX whenever possible because it's their baby, and they want exclusive apps for Win32 because it makes Windows that much more desirable. There's also the fact that a proper SDK for OpenGL doesn't really exist for Windows, which has been a problem for some time. Many of these factors could have been avoided or minimized if Microsoft had done The Right Thing all the way back around 1996, but then they wouldn't have controlled it so tightly.
It makes little difference now. DirectX is only useful if you're developing for Windows or the XBox 360. The rest of the world can't take advantage of it, and there's evidence of a slow but steady sea change coming.
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