GLDirect - run OpenGL thru DirectX?

[rodent]

Is anyone familiar with GLDirect? It seems to make OpenGL run thru DirectX drivers, which could solve the OpenGL driver issue. Does anyone have any experiences regarding the reliability, speed etc of GLDirect?

[baegsi]

How is it supposed to work anyway? You ship it with your game and install it on your customers pc? What would it cost to do so?

Also, it requires directx 8, so on older machines you still have the problem that your customers has to download a driver, right?

[george]

according to the scitech website, it is based on mesa3d (http://www.mesa3d.org), which is an opengl clone, i.e. the functions and syntax are the same. so it really doesn't use opengl, but since the api is the same, you can compile your opengl code with it.

[baegsi]

What do you mean with "compile your opengl code with it"? Do you mean I install that driver on my development machine, compile my code, some dlls or whatever are generated, and I can ship my game with those dlls to a machine that doesn't have any OpenGL driver installed? So that all I need is to have that driver installed on my computer?

[george]

no, i think it is an opengl-style wrapper for directx (not a driver)... they simply copied the opengl api (function names/syntax, etc. etc.) but the underlying code is directx. so since the api is the same as opengl, you don't have to change your opengl code when you compile with the gldirect library. i don't even think it uses dll's, but probably static libraries instead. the resulting executable will be native directx, it will have no opengl whatsoever.

(of course this is just my understanding from what i saw on their website...)

[illume]

They were supposed to give the code back to mesa3d. But as far as I know they haven't!!!

If they haven't given the code back, it is a violation of the mesa licence.

The mesa software library is fairly quick though. I had my really basic game running acceptably with it once I followed some of the optimization hints on the mesa page.