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>>>>Around the same time Microsoft started giving away the 3D licenses, it also quickly announced some very aggressive plans to deliver its 3D software on all the non-Windows platforms that Argonaut already covered. How many of those products have been delivered? Zip. How many will ever be delivered?<<<<
The other vendors weren't the only ones screwed by MSFT in this episode. A lot of game developers were too.
Around the time given in the article (1995), I was working on a new Star Trek game for a game developer in the SF area. Management and other team's programmers at the game company sold my team on using Rendermorphics because it was a good package and because it was cross-platform. Games written for Playstation would be easily ported to Win95, Saturn, Mac, whatever.
So here we all are working along on these betas of Rendermorphics (Reality Labs 3D), and the announcement comes that MSFT has bought RM out. Now I'm not too unhappy yet, I know all about Microsoft's nasty ways but it happens I'm doing a Win95 game so I am happy for what I perceive will be better support and documentation in the future.
Well, a few months later the Playstation and other teams are telling me some of their projects are cancelled. They are too far into coding to back out gracefully, and MSFT has pulled the plugs on Rendermorphics (now Direct 3D) for any platform but Win95. Also, I have got a problem with Windows market share because it looks like NT is not going to be supported right away or at all.
On some of the other projects, the game inventors, the writers, copyright holders, designers, artists, sound and music folks, programmers, managers, marketers, packaging designers - all their work for a year is down the tubes. They are screwed. Some of these projects were salvageable with additional expenditures in the end by switching to the Sony 3D development environment or some other, but in the end the lack of portability added costs to many projects. I don't know how many millions were wasted, how many creative people had their time and ideas wasted, how many multimedia, educational, or game products were cancelled, or what companies went down the tubes, but I do know it wasn't pretty.
Subsequently, MS and RM went quiet for quite a while as they worked on the API. Final nasty surprise for me? The new API is so different I have a major rewrite on my hands to get it all to run on the release version of Sirect 3D. Plus the 3D game accelerator board manufacturers are going to miss all their dates for matching up to this API with device drivers, so the whole thing is going to be sloooow. By this time it is nearing Thanksgiving, and we realize we are going to miss Xmas, for this and other reasons. The game co management decide the answer is to make the game twice as humongous as before (and it was already big), and bring it out the following Xmas.
Not wanting to spend another year of my life on a another soon-to-be-obsolete porkware trek game, I went on to more productive projects. (On the next one, a 2D animation project, I used my own graphics and sound libs and finished in 5 months. An object lesson if there ever was one!)
So, when Microsoft said the rest of Active-X was going to be cross-platform and open last year, I knew it wasn't going to happen. And it didn't.
Chaz |
