Interview with Alex John (DirectX creator) | The Coffeehouse

http://www.shacknews.com/extras/2007/032907_alexstjohn1_1.x

This is a really good inteview with the guy who got DirectX going at MS. Mostly about the frustration, and getting nearly fired trying to push gaming at MS, etc.

Raghavendra_Mudugal

Cool, thanks for the link... Smiley

Knowing the guy behind the X is always X+1...

(I thought about this few days before when installing DX on other machine...)

Edit: and that Doom, i used to play like there is no tomorrow. Big Smile

I miss that game now [C] ... feelings...

Bas

That was a great read. Interesting stuff, although it gets a bit too candid and self-serving after a while. I'm guessing that what he said should be taken with a grain of salt, but it was interesting stuff nonetheless.

Raghavendra_Mudugal

littleguru wrote:

... could get better covered on C9. ....

"+" + "+" = "++"

littleguru

Thank you for the link! DX could get better covered on C9. There is only little information available on here.

I liked this paragraph:

Alex St John wrote:
Well, the PC--forget the operating system--is always a great platform. Modern PCs have superior graphics and memory and processing power to any next-gen console. I don't think Microsoft did anything to help the PC as a gaming platform with Vista, and that's a tremendous frustration because I take it very personally. If I would've been there, I would have made much more aggressive efforts to make sure Vista stayed out of the way of games. What you see with Microsoft is, without people at Microsoft who realize that the operating system does not add value to gaming, it gets in the way, they think they can add more value by adding in more (I need to watch my language) that only gets in the way of making a good game. Unfortunately, Vista does that. Microsoft added more (I need to watch my language) that impedes game development. It's certainly possible to make great games in Vista, it's just more of a pain in the (I need to watch my language) than it needs to be. I think Vista is a missed opportunity for Microsoft to have done a better job in supporting PC gaming.

RoyalSchrubber

Haha, thanks for the link. It's great interview Big Smile

Interview wrote:

Shack: I heard the launch party for Doom was pretty insane.
Alex St John: [laughs] Yeah.

Massif

It was a cool interview, he sounds like an interesting guy.

Although I'd actually slightly disagree with him on the game explorer thing, I've become fed up with games being installed in a dozen different places. However I was very confused when looking for the updater for C&C 3 until I realised that too was embedded in the game explorer... Now I think it's cool.

Now, what are MS going to do about getting game developers to support x64? That's what I want to know.

littleguru

Massif wrote:

It was a cool interview, he sounds like an interesting guy.

Although I'd actually slightly disagree with him on the game explorer thing, I've become fed up with games being installed in a dozen different places. However I was very confused when looking for the updater for C&C 3 until I realised that too was embedded in the game explorer... Now I think it's cool.

Now, what are MS going to do about getting game developers to support x64? That's what I want to know.

XNA

Harlequin

I don't know, reading his PC magazine writeups over the past few years he always seemed like a pompous a$$ to me. And how many of us have had our computers crash because of his WildTangent software creeping onto our computer Cool

ZippyV

Massif wrote:

However I was very confused when looking for the updater for C&C 3 until I realised that too was embedded in the game explorer... Now I think it's cool.

I just couldn't believe EA followed Microsoft's rules for once. They don't even install a new folder in the My Documents folder anymore. Just 1 shortcut in the game explorer.

On the other hand: C&C 3 sucks monkey a$s. You need to open 20.000 ports on the firewall to get online, replays go always out of synch, game is not balanced (Croatia, aarghh), copy protection breaks mouse pointers (no more shadow or animation).

raymond

Good read.

Should have agreed to one interview and then walked.

Cool

AdamKinney

Definitely an interesting story, you can find the full account in Renegades of the Empire.