I don't know the first thing about driver- and DirectX-programming, so please
forgive (and point out) any mistakes.
As a reader of this list I'm wondering; there are quite a few problems that
come from the fact that DirectX isn't 1:1 translatable to OpenGL. How about
talking to some guys from the GPU-driver department about creating a
driver-interface that gives you the right hooks. I guess Parallels and
Transgaming would also be interested in such a development. I can imagine that
the Nouveau-devs and Xorg-radeon-devs would be more than happy to listen.
This goes beyond the scope of the Wine project I think. But since Wine
has the higher level part of DirectX documented and implemented on top
of OpenGL, wouldn't this be the place to start an independent library?
Codeweavers has a lot of knowledge about Windows, DirectX and Linux.
Only Microsoft itself would be a better choice, but I don't think they
really care that much about Linux. ;)
This would mean that DirectX would be as native to Linux and OSX (and friends)
as it would be for Windows. It would be an actual reliable platform that could
be used by game developers. It would de-Windows-ize DirectX. Maybe NVIDIA, ATI
and Intel would also be interested. They could sell their expensive next-gen
cards to those 5% that don't run Windows if games would actually be released
for non-Windows OSes.
Or are there really compelling technical reasons to wrap around OpenGL? I can
think of the Compiz-issue. Similarly, Microsoft stated that they have to wrap
OpenGL around DirectX on Windows, to be able to use both OpenGL and DirectX at
the same time (for Aero). But I suspect that this implementation just developed
naturally because messing with the drivers would be unthinkable way back when.
Remco
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