Prototype Implementation of the Direct3D-on-OpenGL Library

Abstract

In this paper, we aimed to provide Direct3D graphics features on Linux-based systems, which are actively used for various portable game platforms and mobile phone devices. Direct3D is used as one of the most important middle-wares for game and graphics applications developed on Microsoft Windows operating systems. However, this graphics library is not commonly available for other operating systems. We present a prototype library to provide Direct3D functionalities on Linux-based systems, using the OpenGL graphics library. In typical Linux-based systems, only the X window system and OpenGL graphics library are available. There are lots of needs to port Direct3D-based applications on these systems, and our Direct3D-on-OpenGL library would be a good starting point. Selecting a set of widely-used Direct3D data structures and functions, we implemented selected Direct3D functionalities and finally acquired a prototype implementation. Our implementation currently covers 3D transformations, light and material processing, texture mapping, simple animation features and more. We showed its feasibility through successfully executing a set of Direct3D demonstration programs on our implementation.