There's also this goldmine of a thread:

OpenGL-to-Direct3D Wrapper inside Quake 3?

F2bnp wrote:

There's also this goldmine of a thread:

OpenGL-to-Direct3D Wrapper inside Quake 3?

I lul'ed

Yes, it's rather hilarious 🤣 .

To answer the OP's question, I think people have difficulty understanding what Mini-GLs are, most people think it's just Glide, I used to think so too when I got my first Voodoo card. This keeps perpetuating and as such you will find lots and lots of list in which Quake is a Glide game 😁.

A lot of games had the 3dfx logo on the box, yet used D3D for example 😀

Voodoo cards were very fast with miniGL, so maybe that's why people associate Glide with the Voodoo cards.

Ah okay. I was just surprised to find such errors on Vogons. At least I'm not going crazy 😀

F2bnp wrote:

I think people have difficulty understanding what Mini-GLs are, most people think it's just Glide, I used to think so too when I got my first Voodoo card.

It can also go the other way around. I've had various discussions with people who insisted that various early 3d accelerators had full OpenGL support, because GLQuake ran on it via a MiniGL driver.
The logic being something like: "Quake is an OpenGL game, and Quake runs on this hardware, therefore this is OpenGL-compatible hardware".
The sad part is that the MiniGL-driver stuff is literally pointed out in the GLQuake readme (the term 'MiniGL' was not coined yet, I think, but they speak of "GLQuake driver"):

3dfx has provided an opengl32.dll that implements everything glquake needs, but it is not a full opengl implementation. Other opengl applications are very unlikely to work with it, so consider it basically a “glquake driver”.

I used to find it all completely baffling I must say. It was a relief to finally realise I didn't need a 3dfx card for glquake 😉. Sometimes people just want to play games and for them to look and sound good, but they aren't educated consumers. Though needing to know more than you really want to about stuff, in order to make the right purchase decision, seems pretty much a fact of life these days.

Probably doesn't help that a standard unzipped unaltered installation of GLQuake ships with the said 3dfx MiniGL by default (since 3dfx was megapopular then, for convenience), that it'll error out a glide2x not found if you don't have one, giving false pretenses that it's "OK IT'S GLIDE GAME"

also a certain compatibility list collector inssits on listing MiniGL games as Glide for some *CENSORED* reason...

All MiniGL drivers for any 3D graphics accelerators or graphics cards have dependencies on their respective video cards' 3D API DLLs. 😀

Scali wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

There's also this goldmine of a thread:

OpenGL-to-Direct3D Wrapper inside Quake 3?

I lul'ed

"we cant be sure."
"I've looked around in the source code, I know"
"we cant be sure."
lel

mzry wrote:

I was reading that 'List of Glide games' in 'Deep thought' and noticed that Quake engine games are listed there as Glide. Correct me if I'm wrong but these engines are OpenGL. Just because the 3dfx MiniGL basically wraps a subset of OpenGL into Glide doesn't make the game Glide native. Also on that list is Shogo, which is a D3D game. I know because I own it. All the Lithtech v2 games were D3D.

Look at this this way: you have games using General MIDI, but most people want a Roland SoundCanvas to listen to them, because this was what the sound tracks were composed for and how they will sound best. With MiniGL it's similar - it was written in OpenGL because Carmack had enough with proprietary APIs when he wanted to do a 3dfx port. A Riva 128 will also render GLQuake, but, arguably, it will look worse than on a Voodoo. So, formally, GLQuake and its descendants are OpenGL games, but many prefer to play them on Voodoos.

Technically the only thing glquake does different for the voodoo vs the others is adjust the default texture intensity (fake gamma) a little. The "Better" high gamma correction of 1.7 is 3dfx's own doing

Half Life always looked better on Voodoo 5 than other cards to me.

Dunno, I personally find Geforce/2/3 gives much better IQ under OpenGL games (i.e Trilinear filtering support) whereas they are kind of grainy when it comes to D3D.

you can't even get some of the special glide stuff like index+alpha textures in opengl, no way would gl = glide

some non-reference voodoo driver programmers said that minigl goes through glide2x and icd through glide3x

GL1zdA wrote on 2016-06-16, 20:44:

mzry wrote:

I was reading that 'List of Glide games' in 'Deep thought' and noticed that Quake engine games are listed there as Glide. Correct me if I'm wrong but these engines are OpenGL. Just because the 3dfx MiniGL basically wraps a subset of OpenGL into Glide doesn't make the game Glide native. Also on that list is Shogo, which is a D3D game. I know because I own it. All the Lithtech v2 games were D3D.

Look at this this way: you have games using General MIDI, but most people want a Roland SoundCanvas to listen to them, because this was what the sound tracks were composed for and how they will sound best. With MiniGL it's similar - it was written in OpenGL because Carmack had enough with proprietary APIs when he wanted to do a 3dfx port. A Riva 128 will also render GLQuake, but, arguably, it will look worse than on a Voodoo. So, formally, GLQuake and its descendants are OpenGL games, but many prefer to play them on Voodoos.

Sorry for the nekro-bump, just re-reading this old thread and thank you Gl1zdA for the explanation, but you're explanation isn't correct, you're looking at everything from a slightly off-angle (not the sound canvas analogy) In specific regard to:

With MiniGL it's similar - it was written in OpenGL because Carmack had enough with proprietary APIs when he wanted to do a 3dfx port.

Let me re-phrase that sentence to make it correct:

With MiniGL it's similar - Carmack wrote GLQuake because he had enough with propietary APIs and he wanted to do an OpenGL port

To clarify, he did not want to make a 3dfx port, he wanted to make an OpenGL port. Why is that clarification important? Because an OpenGL port can be played on any OGL capable hardware, so maximum support for his game. Also important to point out, MiniGL has *nothing* to do with Carmac as implied in the original quote. All MiniGL is, or was, was each graphics card manufacturer making a 'quick and dirty' GL driver to *just* run Quake based engines, rather than support the entirety of the OpenGL 1.1 subset of features.

Sorry for the nekro, but I just had to clarify this, as it doesn't help the cause of my original thread opener ;D

I'm guessing the 3DFX splash screen which pops up when you run GLQuake using the MiniGL driver may have added to the confusion.

Normally, that logo only shows up for games which use the actual Glide API (e.g. Unreal).

Scali wrote on 2016-06-16, 12:10:

F2bnp wrote:

There's also this goldmine of a thread:

OpenGL-to-Direct3D Wrapper inside Quake 3?

I lul'ed

Me to, but then its GERI...you know GERI he couldnt ressist.