Client
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. is a subsidiary of Microsoft that is focused on engaging with Open Source communities and developing stronger relationships with those communities. The company has been heavily involved with numerous business groups. It has been a part of evolving the standards initiatives across Microsoft.
Business Need
Cinder is a library for professional-quality creative coding that makes it simple for developers to create rich, interactive graphical applications that run on multiple platforms with the use of OpenGL. Although OpenGL is the industry standard, the system doesn’t work on Windows RT, which runs on the Windows phone and Surface.
With the implementation of DirectX into Cinder, developers will not have to worry about porting existing applications into Windows RT. It will allow them to widen their application’s exposure to a larger audience and have more effective support for the Windows platform.
Solution
As a result, Akvelon implemented DirectX into Cinder to meet the needs of developers looking to utilize Windows RT support or release their work strictly on any Windows platform without OpenGL.
Akvelon worked through all of the source codes of Cinder to determine the system’s dependencies on OpenGL and implement the DirectX equivalents. This was done while changing as little of the interface as possible, so that existing Cinder users can quickly adapt to the new DirectX layer. Akvelon applied best practices to:
•Write the coding for DirectX
•Test various existing projects
•Compare old and new systems for consistency and flaws
Benefits & Results
Through Akvelon’s efforts, they successfully provided game developers the opportunity to expand their applications’ platform compatibility, with special consideration to the Windows Phone and Surface.
Additionally, other benefits include: the developer community can now develop Cinder applications on the Windows RT platform without being restricted to only Windows XP and up, Mac OS X, and iPhone and iPad and are efforts also improved efficiency by reducing developer time spent on platform specifics.
