I was wide-eyed and curious. And much before the year 2000, I only owned Windows-based computers, purchased most of my software for money, and also purchased a license of 3D Game Studio, some version of which is still being sold today. The version that I purchased well before 2000 was using the ‘A4′ game engine, where all the 3DGS versions have a game engine specified by the latter ‘A’ and a number.
That version of 3DGS was based on DirectX 7 because Microsoft owns and uses DirectX, and DirectX 7 still had as one of its capabilities to switch back into software-mode, even though it was perhaps one of the earliest APIs that offered hardware-rendering, provided that is, that the host machine had a graphics card capable of hardware-rendering.
I created a simplistic game using that engine, which had no real title, but which I simply referred to as my ‘Defeat The Guard Game’. And in so doing I learned a lot.
The API which is referred to as OpenGL, offers what DirectX versions offer. But because Microsoft has the primary say in how the graphics hardware is to be designed, OpenGL versions are frequently just catching up to what the latest DirectX versions have to offer. There is a loose correspondence in version numbers.
Shortly after the year 2000, I upgraded to a 3D Game Studio version with their ‘A6′ game engine. This was a game engine based on DirectX 9.0c, which was also standard with Windows XP, which no longer offered any possibility of software rendering, but which gave the customers of this software product their first opportunity to program shaders. And because I was playing with the ‘A6′ game engine for a long time, in addition owning a PC that ran Windows XP for a long time, the capabilities of DirectX 9.0c became etched in my mind. However, as fate would have it, I never actually created anything significant with this game engine version – only snippets of code designed to test various capabilities.
Continue reading A bit of my personal history, experimenting in 3D game design.