Comment by pandaman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pandaman | Hacker News Reader

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I was also involved in game graphics at that time (preceding DirectX) and do not quite remember that as you do. Debugging graphics on PC was a pain, you had to either use WinDbg remote mode (which was a pain to set up to get source symbols) or SoftICE and an MDA monitor. That's just for the regular CPU debugger because of the fullscreen mode. There had not been a graphics debugger until DX9. Meanwhile all consoles could be debugged from the same dev machine, and starting from PS2 we had graphics debuggers and profilers. Even the OG xbox had PIX, which introduced pixel debugging (though was a bit of a pain to set up and needed the game to submit each frame twice).

HW OpenGL was not available on the consumer machines (Win95, Win2K) at all, GLQuake used so-called "mini-driver" which was just a wrapper around few Glide APIs and was a way to circumvent id's contract with Rendition, which forbade them from using any proprietary APIs other than Verite (the first HW accelerated game they released had been VQuake), by the time the full consumer HW OpenGL drivers became available circa OpenGL 2.0 time, DirectX 9 already reigned supreme. You can tell by the number of OpenGL games released after 2004 (mobile games did not use OpenGL but the OpenGL ES, which is a different API).

You must have worked on this earlier than me. I started with DX7 on Windows, before that I worked purely in OpenGL on workstations on high end visual simulation. Yes, in DX7 we used printf debugging and in full screen-only work, you dumped to a text file or as you say, MDA if necessary for interactive debugging, though we avoided that. DX9's visual debugger was great.

I don't remember console development fondly. This is 25 years ago, so memory is hazy, but the GameCube compiler and toolchain was awful to work with, while the PS2 TOOL compile/test cycle was extremely slow and the API's were hard to work with, but that was more hardware craziness than anything. XBox was the easiest when it came out. Dreamcast was on the way out, but I remember really enjoying being clever with the various SH4 math instructions. Anyhow, I think we're both right, just in different times. In the DX7 days, NVIDIA and ATI were shipping OpenGL libraries which were usable, but yes, by then, DX was the 800lb gorilla on windows. The only reason that OpenGL worked at all was due to professional applications and big companies pushing against Microsoft's restrictions.

I don't recall any slowness on the PS2 development, I dreaded touching anything graphical on PC though as the graphics bugs tended to BSOD the whole machine and rebooting 20+ times a day was not speeding up anything (all the Windows took their sweet time to boot, not to mention restarting all the tools you needed and recovering your workspace) lol.

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