Prior to your current employ, you were NVIDIA's Developer Relations Manager. What tempted you away from NVIDIA? You'd told this interviewer (some 3 years back) that your position as a Developer Relations Manager at NVIDIA was a enjoyable one but you also mentioned that you wanted to go back to making games.…. ?

Yes, but as we all know things change! I wouldn’t say I was really tempted away from Nvidia. I left Nvidia to take some time off, I’d been working almost solidly at Nvidia and before that at ATI and before that at ImagiNation Network for over eight years and the longest break I had taken was two weeks. I decided to drop out for awhile and semi-retire. After about 18 months, I was getting a bit antsy and coincidentally Microsoft contacted me about this job. As far as going back to making games - I’m doing that in a sense now, but in this position I get to affect 200+ games a year - it’s definitely a satisfying place to work!

A huge part of your job requires a lot of interaction with ISVs/developers. There are developers, and there are "Garage Developers", a group of people you described as "building games for the right reason". How often, in your line of work, have you interacted with these sort of for-the-love-of-gaming developers? What differentiates them from developers whose real motivation is making profits?

I get to interact with them all the time. I take great pride in some of the “garage developers” I got to work with while I was at Nvidia (WXP, Crytek and Croteam to name a few) and I look forward to working with more here at Microsoft. As far as building them “for the right reasons” - I think anyone that wants to build and ship a game is basically doing it for the right reasons. It’s about passion and vision and blending it with technology - it’s also about making money - nothing wrong with that!

DirectX 9 has seen a far quicker acceptance by the developers compared to previous DirectXs. Has this more to do with DirectX 9's superiority over previous versions or has this more to do with the fact that DirectX 9 hardware are selling very well, or….. ?

I think it has to do with the fact that it is a superior technology and that one thing our team has done well is take the feedback from the people in the trenches (i.e. the game developers implementing our technology). It was also a natural evolution from previous versions so it was easier from developers to move from DirectX 8 to DirectX 9. We also provided some great tools and technologies with the DirectX SDK that have made implementing DirectX easier, we try and provide tools and samples that will help developers get their apps running faster, looking better and shipping sooner.

QUOTE

"At the end of the day we are trying to make playing games on Windows better - if a developer prefers to use OpenGL we will do what we can to help them ship a better game on our platform!"

Chris Donahue
Microsoft

DirectX has improved exponentially over the years, to the point where it has converted some "die-hard" OpenGL enthusiasts. How would you convince someone, whether a hobbyist or does it for a living, who has been programming in OpenGL to switch to DirectX? For example, there's a general notion that DirectX is about universality whereas OpenGL is about flexibility…..

I think there is a misconception about DirectX being less flexible or a less accurate API. I think we may have been able to do a better job at educating people about the improvements we have enabled in the current version of DirectX, we are constantly trying to improve it and we work with all developers to try and get their input to make it more usable and feature rich and flexible. We continue to strive in making a better solution and are daily trying to make it better. At the end of the day we are trying to make playing games on Windows better - if a developer prefers to use OpenGL we will do what we can to help them ship a better game on our platform!

What's with John Carmack and his aversion to DirectX anyway? Why haven't you been able to work on him successfully? :) Personally, he appears to be rather open to concepts and especially to emerging technologies... so what's holding him back from leaving OpenGL and going DirectX?

I think that’s a question better asked of John!

Can you tell us if proprietary API functions like OpenGL's vendor-specific extensions are a good or bad thing from all viewpoints (i.e. feedback to you from API developers, software/hardware developers and software/hardware purchasers)? This relates to the previous question's comment about universality and flexibility.

Like most things there are good and bad sides - the good side is the extensions allow IHVs to enable all the functionality in their hardware immediately. One of the down sides is that generally no HV enables those features the same way so ISVs have a much more difficult job getting those things to work. DirectX is revved so often we generally are able to get those same functions available fairly soon, that’s one reason we haven’t gone to an extensible model to date.