Coinciding with the news from Dynamix that it has renamed its upcoming title Earthsiege 3 to Starsiege, is additional news that the title will be supporting OpenGL - and that the game's Direct3D driver has been put on indefinite hold.

　　Rick Overman, lead programmer for the project, stated in his plan file on Tuesday that the Direct3D interface "has been a hassle to work with" and that the deciding factor to hold back the D3D driver was the API's inability to support a constant frame rate because of a glitch in the way D3D downloads textures and sends them to the video card.

　　Apparently, the problem causes the game to stutter as it downloads new textures, and the Glide (the name for 3Dfx's native Voodoo and Voodoo2 drivers) version of the game has none of the same problems.

　　GameSpot News contacted Overman to find out how the decision came about. He said that the answer was simple: "There are a few games that do two pass texturing besides Starsiege (for example Quake/QuakeII). The point is that this technique requires your game to download additional alpha textures which compound the texture downloading problems we're experiencing."

　　Overman continued, "Another problem is that the current version of Direct3D (DX5) has difficulty determining if a particular set of features can be used simultaneously, it's a feature detection issue. OpenGL requires a minimum standard feature set."

　　Also, D3D can't do multiple functions at once; OpenGL can. The ability for multiple functions in D3D may not come to gamers' desktops until DirectX 7.0. In short, "OpenGL has a more complete feature set and is more stable than Direct3D. "

　　He went on to say that Microsoft had made two trips to Dynamix to help with the problem, but both visits proved to be fruitless.

　　"Most games have gotten around the problem by having a very limited set of textures and never download new textures during gameplay. I refuse to compromise the look and feel of Starsiege because a third-party interface is lacking," continued Overman.

　　Given the fact that Dynamix hasn't exactly embraced the world of 3D hardware acceleration with many of its recent titles, GameSpot News asked if part of the problem lay in the fact that this was a relatively new realm for the company.

　　Overman said that previous titles had begun their development before the advent of 3D hardware acceleration, and the teams are now working on ways to get those titles up to speed. Starsiege is a completely new engine that will be powering a few other titles for Dynamix.

　　OpenGL, he added, will be implemented in the next technology release demo of Starsiege as well.

　　Overman has been with Dynamix for seven year and has worked on Earthsiege 2, Silent Thunder, Red Baron, Aces of the Deep, and Battledrome. His complete plan file is on the next page.This is a copy of Rick Overman's plan file posted by request:

　　I have never modified my .plan after posting it before but due to the heated nature of this debate and several misinterpretations of my original post, I feel it's necessary to make a few edits to clarify our decision. Here we go...

　　OpenGL SupportWe have decided to put our Direct3D driver on indefinite hold. From the beginning the D3D interface has been a hassle to work with not to mention buggy video drivers, drivers which report capabilities they don't actually support and the inability to detect supported feature combinations. We do have a Direct3D driver up and working but we have been unable to work around a pause that happens during texturedownloading. Due to the way Direct3D handles texture downloading and the texture memory on the video card it is impossible for us to maintain a smooth frame rate. The result is a visible stuttering when we download new textures. If I compare our Starsiege Glide driver against the our Direct3D driver on the same machine and the same Voodoo1 card the Glide driver works flawlessly while the Direct3D driver stutters along. Most games have gotten around the problem by not downloading textures during gameplay and/or having a very limited set of textures. I refuse to compromise the look and feel of Starsiege.

　　Microsoft has made 2 trips to Dynamix to try various tricks to work around the problem with no success.

　　That said, our current plan is to support OpenGL instead of Direct3D. OpenGL as many advantages, if you're interested in the gory details there are dozens (if not hundreds) of OpenGL vs. Direct3D discussions/ comparisons on the web. I'll keep everyone posted on our progress.

　　So what does this mean to you? It means Starsiege will look better and run better on more hardware cards. All the cards we were targeting with Direct3D already have great OpenGL drivers and all the new cards in development, that I'm aware of, will be supporting OpenGL: Riva128, Intel740, Rendition 2100/2200, 3Dfx, Hilander, Permidia2, GLINT, etc.

　　Our current plan is to ship with the following graphics drivers:-OpenGL-Glide-PowerVR (NEC is working on the driver)