from Hacker News

12 Years of Portability Thanks to OpenGL: Mac - Windows - iPhone (and more)

by arandomJohn on 1/12/10, 11:44 PM with 4 comments

How using a standards compliant library let me port a game that started as a CS course assignment to multiple platforms and eventually to the iPhone.

  • by scottjackson on 1/13/10, 3:03 AM

    The list of games written with OpenGL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OpenGL_programs

    Notable games: Doom 3, Far Cry, Max Payne, the Quake series, Red Faction, Runescape, Second Life, Spore, Star Wars: Jedi Knight and Star Wars: KOTOR, Unreal Tournament, UT2004, UT3, Warcraft 3, WoW.

    Most of the big-name ones default to Direct3D when they're running on Windows though.

    I have very little idea of how D3D and OpenGL work (I've never written anything substantial with them), but I'm very interested in the idea of an open standard for rendering games. That portability story in the post is great.

    What's the deal with D3D? How is it better than OpenGL?