Microsoft Windows Vista is a now something real. The product is being marketed hard and the first beta version is hangind around. And with every new version of Windows comes rumors and angers about the next bad game Microsoft will be playing.

Apparently Microsoft took the opportunity of its new system to try to get rid of OpenGL, the standard graphics API which competes for a long time with DirectX, its proprietary solution. In Vista, OpenGL would be implemented on top of DirectX and not at the same level like before. If it’s right, OpenGL application will perform badly and won’t have access to the full potential of graphic cards. The OpenGL community is really angry about that and I can understand the programmers who prefers this API than DirectX that it is frustrating. But that doesn’t means the end of OpenGL at all.

Understand that except for some Windows games, OpenGL is widely used, it’s a standard API used on every non-Microsoft system. That means mobile phones, gaming consoles, graphic workstation, GNU/Linux and MacOS X. That’s a lot of growing opportunities for OpenGL.

Mac gamers have been frightened by the news. They think that means: no more games for the Mac. But they have to understand that its not the API that makes a port happening on the Mac, that’s a business or marketing thing. Game developers are very used to cross-platform programming and I bet that every game is portable in the sense that it has been carefully designed to separate the layers specific to a technology. That’s a classic way of designing programs. Console programmers do that all the time. Every console has its own graphic API and it doesn’t frighten the developers. It’s a parameter they take into account when designing their engine. A complete game is a huge application and the graphic engine is only a small part of it (15%, I guess). Porting it is not a big deal.

When I was working for Kalisto on 4 Wheel Thunder, a racing 3D game, it was targetted to run on a Dreamcast console. But we designed the graphic engine to be independant from the underlying API. And when I finally had to port the game to Windows using DirectX I was able to do it in a week. How hard is that?

Concerning Windows Vista, I hope Microsoft won’t do that. There is a lot of profesional application that use OpenGL that will need to be ported back to DirectX. Even if not a big deal, a lot of PC programmers would have to learn the joy of dealing with multiple API. But I don’t think that the battle ends here.