Hi guys,
I just found out about this driver, called VMWare, so you can run Microsoft DX program on Mac.
Any1 got any recent news on this thing? Any opinion? I really intrested in Direct X game programming (don’t like OpenGL :P) but I’m a Mac User.
thx 4 any reply
sorry 4 bad english
VMWare is a virtualisation tool, not a driver, afaik it doesn’t let you run DX on a Mac anymore than Parallels or even Bootcamp does, it lets you run Windows on a virtual machine, and of course in Windows you can run then DirectX, albeit incredibly slowly.
The proprietary nature of Microsoft DirectX makes it less than fully welcome for cross platform products. The only tool that I ever heard of for developers who wanted to use DX-a-like on Macs was MacDX - http://macdx.coderus.com/ I’ve no idea how well it runs.
OpenGL is the API of choice for 3D on the Mac. Also, when it comes down to structure of programs that use DX or OGL, its possible to structure your OpenGL code to be same as if you used DX. Feel free to start some threads here if you have any more questions about it.
Any reason you don’t like OpenGL? Not trying to start a debate, just genuinely curious… was wondering what things you disliked specifically.
well, I should’ve use another word rather than “hate” 
according to my (very short) experience, coding in Open GL is hell of a task. I’ve done a small programming task and I think it’s too much pain to produce a simple graphic implementation. However, I never try to code Direct X, about some did say that Direct X simplify things in Open GL(please correct me if I’m wrong). Is it right?
I’m planning to stick on my Mac Environment and planning to do some Graphic Programming stuff. But honestly, until now, I’m confuse either my decision is the right one or not. Anyone got advice?
Third question, is OpenGL is a cross platform. I mean, if I code my OpenGL game on Mac, can I run it on Windows and Linux? (like the one you can do in Java). If it’s possible, how can I do it?
thx for any reply
sorry for bad english
please correct me freely if I’m wrong
If you want to program XPlatform games, you could certainly do worse than look at SDL which is designed specifically for XPlatform games programming and OpenAL which was co-developed by Creative Labs as a XPlatform audio programming API.
Unfortunately, even all of this can’t make the code you write for one platform work flawlessly on another, for example: in Windows, the OpenGL context is lost every time you resize a window which just isn’t a problem in Linux (I don’t know about OSX). On the bright side, SDL 1.3 is being written to handle OpenGL contexts automagically for you so you don’t have to worry about that sort of thing even in Windows.
As far as I know the differences between the two API’s is not very great, so if you have trouble with OpenGL you’ll probably not find DirectX that much easier. OpenGL is also cross platform which is a huge bonus. I believe that DirectX is considered to be slightly ahead in several areas of performance and features. There are many things to think about when choosing what to develop for, maybe both?
Short of GLUT and a couple of other window libraries, there aren’t one’s that cover all three (Mac has their own contexts as well).
If you go the X11 route you have 2 out of the 3 covered though. (well, if the Mac user has X11 installed.)
I’ve found that Direct X gives many more options for some things, many less options for others. It seems to have a higher learning curve than OpenGL. That being said; because its one company, rather than a standards group, new features get added to the language faster than OpenGL.
Lately this has been changing though. The Knronos Group is now working on OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenGL 3.0. Things are starting to look very promising on this end once again.
That said, there is also Managed Direct X (MDX) now re-badged as XNA which virtually lets you sneeze out code and have it work. Unfortunately you don’t get to write your shaders in it - although with Rendermonkey or FXcomposer that’s less of a hassle. I’ve heard talk of XNA compatibility making it into Mono in the near future.
hmm…
thx dude…
really helpfull…I think I’ve made my decision and start programming game with openGL in my Mac. I hope it’s worth to try…
wish me luck ok…
thx for any reply…
sorry 4 bad english…
If you want cross platform compatibility, Qt is quite nice for widgets if you find GLUT a bit too… basic 
FLTK is also a good option for cross-platform. I’ve used it on a couple of occasions in college.
If you’re gonna do Mac-only though. Just use Cocoa.
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