I was fortunate enough to sit in on Martin Slater’s BioShock post-mortem down at Game Connect last weekend.
With hands firmly clenching his speaker podium, Slater held his ground against a steady bombardment of questions on BioShock. I found his experiences working with Microsoft’s DirectX 10 the most interesting, so I’ve replicated them here from data carefully extracted from my voice recorder:
[DirectX 10]offers your gameplay nothing … DirectX 10, probably for the next three, four, five years is not important to you. Microsoft are going to tell you everything under the sun differently. Everybody under the sun is going to tell you differently.
I’m not sure it offers your visuals anything either, judging from Crysis and its configuration file silliness.
DirectX 10 isn’t all bad though – hey, Microsoft didn’t go to all that trouble for nothing:
You’ve got the business side and you’ve got the games side. The games side, you want to minimise the technology because you want to maximise the amount of time you spend interacting with game design. DirectX 10, for all your game programmers, is a beautiful place.
I can’t help but agree with Slater. I also think people need to start understanding that DirectX 10 and Direct3D 10 are two different things – one is a collection of APIs, while the other is one of those APIs.
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