The Web has been buzzing with Microsoft's showing of a supposed version of GLQuake running under DirectX at Microsoft's Meltdown DirectX Developers Conference last week. Wednesday, GameSpot News spoke with Microsoft's DirectX product manager, Kevin Bachus, to clear up the GLQuake-running-on-Direct3D mess.

　　First off, the demo at the conference was not meant to slap John Carmack in the face or belittle the amazing game that GLQuake is. It was meant to show game developers that DirectX 5 is a friendly and fast way to develop games on the new DirectX API. And yes, a summer intern who didn't previously know DirectX wrote the code for it in three weeks. Yet all the intern did was reroute the 50 or so OpenGL programming calls used by GLQuake by converting them to similar Direct3D calls. And if you want to take a look at it, you're out of luck. Microsoft has no plans for doing anything with this demo version of OpenGL, so you won't see it in stores anytime soon.

　　"Microsoft loves Quake," said Bachus, "It is the first id product that needed portions of Windows to run, and so it makes our platform look good."

　　Bachus admits that, "DirectX 3.0 was difficult to learn to program," and Microsoft's emphasis with the newly completed DirectX 5.0 is that it should make game programming easier because "it is harder to code incorrectly." The new DirectX 5.0 was just completed and should be accompanying games very soon. Specifications for the next version of DirectX 6.0 should be out shortly, and Microsoft hopes to release a full version sometime around April or May next year.

　　Microsoft is pouring its efforts into Direct3D instead of OpenGL but the reason for this, according to Bachus, is because there just aren't enough internal 3-D developers available to work on two separate APIs. A majority of game companies are supporting Direct3D, and Microsoft needs to support those companies as well as id. Some of the bigger games supporting Direct3D include: Tomb Raider 2, Unreal, and Populous 3.