The main reason that developers intentionally added cheats in their games in days of yore was for marketing reasons. I worked on games where the publishers had various cheats as part of their requirements for the games. Why? Because then our publisher can negotiate favorable / bigger press in exchange for giving specific gaming magazines those cheat codes first.

"DirectX is NOT good. It's suable. It's primary reason is to help people into new OS's. A simple look at it's history will reveal that."

Umm, so are you going to list a reason why directX is currently crap, without giving a single reason that it's bad or another reason why any other alternatives are goood? I dont even know what you mean when you say that the primary reason for directX is to help people into new OSs. It's a well planned abstraction of current generation rendering hardware (at least Direct3d which is what this whole thread has mostly been talking about). That's what it is. To help people into new OS's for rendering, perhaps you are thinking of GLUT, or another high level cross platform wrapper?



"You mean, beside the PC?"

There is no standard system on the PC built into every game for all of the buddy-type stuff. If Im running Unreal on the PC fullscreen there is no built in way for someone playing a different game to invite me to theirs. If they are lucky I might have a messenger client open that they know my handle for and that they are running too, and that Im not running fullscreen.... but aside from that, no, it's not built in.



"Anyway, I suggest you work with other API and other Platforms before defending MS."

And as I posted before, I have close to 3x as many sku variants under my career as I do individual games. See, OpenGL, various flavors of DirectX for the PC, DirectX for the Xbox, DirectX for the Xbox360, GX (gamecube), PS2 video driver writing(no real API to speak of), and GCM (PS3). Also, if you read my post, I gave actual reasons why DirectX was better than the alternative on the PC, and I did not defend MS, I defended DirectX. I have yet to see one point in your post that shows that you know what you are talking about here.

You can fault MS for a lot of their work, but you seem to be way off base here. Ive professionally written games (graphics primarily) for the past seven years, and have done it as a hobby for several years before that.

Now, to be honest, I have not done much winsock coding. All that I know about it is when I tried it for the first time, I had a windows app communicating with our game and sending and receving packets bug free in under a day. I didnt have a single problem or error that wasnt my fault (despite checking for all of the error codes that the winsock API can generate).

As for why they they made the XBOX version of the API that is only partially compatible with the PC version, well that is an API that is targeted at a specific hardware. DirectX for the PC is targeted at any number of consumer cards. The xbox version is targetted at specific custom hardware that is close to the PC version, but not entirely like it. In addition, since the hardware is known for the xbox, the xbox version of direct x gives you lower level access to the hardware. (See better debugging, faster code, more utility, plus support for hardware functionality that does not exist in the standard PC cards). They release different API versions for the PC for different hardware revisions. The hardware manufacturers asked for this so that they could conform to the standards as for cheaper / released sooner hardware. (Or so they said when they gave presentations at one of the studios that I worked at). So they often come out very quickly as a way for the hardware manufacturers to incrementally support new features between major revisions).

Im not sure how many companies are switching to OpenAL. All I know is that I have worked on nine released games in my professional career (multiply that by three if you want to include unshipped titles and individual skus of the same game (which I guess is relevant since you want to debate competing APIs here)), and I have never worked on a single title that has shipped using OpenAL. Not to say it's not widely used, but for now Im going to dismiss your anecdotal evidence. In my experience some games use OpenAL, and others do not. I dont see any one system being left in massive numbers for another.

If you want to bash MS about APIs ten years ago, well there are good reasons that a lot of companies used glide. First of all, it did NOT work on all graphics cards. Most vendor's drivers for their hardware was very buggy at best. Also, one card that it did NOT work on was... The 3dfx line of cards. Which supported... Glide. So if you wanted to write code for what was the best card on the market, you HAD to use 3dfx's proprietary API. (3dfx's decision, NOT microsoft). Why did glide work so well? Well, because it was written for a known piece of hardware only. Much like... DirectX for the xbox. (see above). So if I understand it correctly, you were just bashing microsoft for making a separate api for a custom piece of hardware, and then in your next point you are bashing them for some other company doing exactly the same thing?

I agree, DirectX started out as a piece of garbage. I also feel that OpenGL evolved into a piece of garbage (granted this was back in the 1.0 days). I much prefer microsoft evolving the API rather than just tacking on tons of extensions (or worse, vendor specific extensions), to try to program for a paradigm that just didnt make sense anymore. (See DirectXs early support of multitexturing versus OpenGL tacking it onto the side of an API that wasnt planned with this feature in mind). I hear OGL has gotten much better in this respect, but in my previous experience I left it precisely because MS came out with different versions of directx as hardware and graphics programming evolved. I still shudder at the memories of trying to get OpenGL working on several cards with it's huge mess of extensions that really didnt belong.

Im going to stop here, but I just wanted to defend MS (yeah, not popular on this site) for one of the things I think it did right. DirectX is very easy to use, widely supported, and revisited whenever it makes sense to. Sure you can argue that their recent operating systems, and other APIs might be troublesome, but what microsoft has given to the game development world has really received no complains from any other industry friends that I have. While I can only speculate why Champions is being delayed, you have to remember there are a lot of caveats to making a game work properly with xbox live. Sure you can argue that a game should not HAVE to work with it, but I believe xbox live (while it can be a PIA to make a game compatible with) is a great boon to the console community. I mean, before it was around there was no other system in placewhere you can chat, create a single buddy list, invite people to a game that they arent current playing, etc FOR EVERY GAME ON THAT PLATFORM? This was definitely a feature that users wanted and the sales numbers back it up.