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GUI XBox (Games) Microsoft Windows

Creator of DirectX Dies at Age 55 (livemint.com) 94

Posted by EditorDavid from the living-on-in-Xbox dept.
The Wall Street Journal looks back to the days when Windows was "a loser in the world of computer games." But to change that, Eric Engstrom and his cohorts "secretly hired programmers to get the work done, and they had to do an end run around partners like Intel," remembers VentureBeat.

Long-time Slashdot reader whh3 shares The Wall Street Journal's report: Windows inserted itself between game programs and the computer hardware in a way that slowed down graphics and animation. Game developers vastly preferred the DOS operating system, which didn't gum up their special effects. That created an opportunity for three Microsoft misfits — Eric Engstrom, Alex St. John and Craig Eisler. Mr. Engstrom, who died Dec. 1 at the age of 55, and his pals formed one of several factions within Microsoft trying to solve the game problem. Openly contemptuous of colleagues who didn't share their ideas, they were so obnoxious that Brad Silverberg, who ran the Windows business, dubbed them the Beastie Boys. He had to fend off frequent demands for their dismissal.

Yet the solution they developed, DirectX, beat anything else on offer inside Microsoft. DirectX software recognized games and allowed them direct access to the computer's graphical capabilities, allowing a richer game experience than DOS could. "It was brilliant," Mr. Silverberg said. Launched in 1995, DirectX wowed game developers and led to a flood of new games for computers loaded with Windows. That success emboldened Microsoft to plunge deeper into the lucrative gaming market by developing the Xbox console.

Microsoft's game business produced $11.6 billion of revenue in the year ended June 30...

"He thought things were possible that nobody else on the planet thought would be possible," said Ben G. Wolff, a friend who runs a robotics company, "and sometimes he'd be right."
"DirectX remains the foundation for many games on Windows 10 and the Xbox Series X," writes Engadget, "and it's likely to remain relevant for years to come."

And VentureBeat shared this remark from Alex St. John at a memorial service for Engstrom. "He had huge dreams and huge fantasies, and he always took us all with him."
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Creator of DirectX Dies at Age 55 More

Creator of DirectX Dies at Age 55

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  • RIP In Peace (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymouse Cowtard ( 6211666 ) on Sunday December 13, 2020 @07:46PM (#60827190) Homepage
    Thanks for going against the grain and achieving something great.

  • Be aware of acetaminophen (Score:4, Interesting)

    by olsmeister ( 1488789 ) on Sunday December 13, 2020 @07:47PM (#60827194)

    He died at a hospital in Seattle. His wife, Cindy Engstrom, said he had injured one of his feet in October, accidentally took too much Tylenol for pain relief and suffered liver damage.

    Anyone that drinks a lot of alcohol should stay away from this stuff as well. It's metabolized in the liver, like alcohol is.

    • Truthfully, I find it difficult that a computer specialist of his stature would make that kind of mistake. But at the same time he may have forgotten dosages he took. If it hurt that bad why didn't he go to the doctor??
      Regardless, rest in peace fellow nerd.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Ogive17 ( 691899 )
        Why, are computer specialists medical experts as well?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bobby ( 109046 )

          Why, are computer specialists medical experts as well?

          Your sarcasm aside, it's more that someone who seems highly intelligent and does highly cerebral work would be cognizant of the danger of excess acetaminophen, and would be able to keep track of how much he was taking.

          All that said, maybe his genius was much more right-brained, and he wasn't ruled by hard reasoning, but more emotional inspiration. From what little I've read and listened to some of his interviews, he seemed to think he was strong, almost a conqueror, so maybe he knew he was taking too much

      • A lot of people don't know how dangerous it can be to take too much acetaminophen. Also, a lot of people don't know that pain killers like Vicodin have a lot of it in them. So you may think you're balancing things by taking some Tylenol and some Vicodin, but now you've ODed.

        Also, people in pain usually are not thinking clearly.

      • Yes, computer experts are typically paragons of health who treat their body as a temple, eat well, sleep well and exercise regularly, so it's very surprising to see one not take extreme care of their health.

      • It's not that hard to forget when you've last taken a pill, especially if you're feeling unwell, and if you get it wrong a couple of times you can end up with an overdose. It's a good idea to write down the times one took painkillers.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • I can confirm from several years ago. I would have LOVED to find this "Opiate Epidemic" people talk about, with doctors giving out Oxy PEZ dispensers. Even with the MRI of my blown disk pushing hard on my nerves, I could get little more than Oxy flavored Ibuprofen. I normally don't drink, but was soon pounding 80 proof vodka to make the meds go further while at home. (Actually quite effective, but not recommended.) Of course, the actual problem is illegal heroin and fentanyl. You can't shakedown a drug king
    • Acetaminophen is a component of many prescription opiate tablets. I was prescribed Norco for post-surgical pain, and also instructed to use OTC acetaminophen or NSAIDs, with careful attention to dosage and specified daily maximum amounts. Having observed an RN friend after surgery, and having experienced post-surgical delirium as a child, I took a hint and charted every dose in a notebook, and had the people who I was staying with supervise until it was clear that I was competent.

      • That is a very smart idea if you are taking more than one kind of pill. You don't want to double dose the wrong thing.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pjt33 ( 739471 )

          The other way of doing it is to get one of those containers with seven compartments and dole out each day's drugs at the start of the week. The only problem I've found with doing that is that if you do accidentally forget to take one, you then have to work out where to put it to keep it safe until you dole out the next week's.

    • Re:Be aware of acetaminophen (Score:5, Funny)

      by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Sunday December 13, 2020 @10:43PM (#60827664)

      It's a molecule. Stay away from molecules. Molecules are chemicals.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      Oh, that's really sad. I had assumed it was a blood clot from the injury that caused a massive stroke or pulmonary embolism or something.

    • For UK readers: acetaminophen is paracetamol. If I read the Wikipedia article right, it is the drug most often associated with overdoses. This rather surprised me. I thought it would be opiates, because they are addictive, and have recreational effects, which paracetamol does not.

  • RIP (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mobby_6kl ( 668092 ) on Sunday December 13, 2020 @08:01PM (#60827236)

    May he rest in peace in the volumetric clouds in the sky.

    Even though I'm old enough to be around that time, I never looked into how it came about, it was kind of just there and made games work. So I'm quite surprised that they had to fight tooth and nail to make it happen.

    Mad respect to him and the team, even though there were other APIs it was probably what made PC gaming happen in the way that it did.

    • Re:RIP (Score:5, Informative)

      by dow ( 7718 ) on Sunday December 13, 2020 @08:45PM (#60827330)

      At the time there was a competing standard which did something similar to the Direct3D part of DirectX, called OpenGL. Microsoft was a partner in the development of OpenGL, and it was cross platform. Some of the first 3D graphics accelerators for consumer PCs used proprietary standards based on cut down OpenGL. It was OpenGL for professionals, and 3DGL (I think?) and later DirectX for games IIRC. The key thing they had with DirectX is that it wasn't cross-platform and was considered easier to work with than OpenGL.

      Before DirectX, you had to hope that a game developer had coded support for your particular 3D card, joystick, soundcard or controller.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kriston ( 7886 )

        There was this slight problem with Glide, which was a proprietary alternative used by 3dfx Voodoo card used by games like Quake.

        The multiplatform OpenGL eventually superceded Glide. DirectX was always notoriously non-multiplatform and still is.

      • OpenGL was never intended to be a gaming API. It was sort of shoehorned into the role. If you want to know a little about it's history:

        https://www.khronos.org/opengl... [khronos.org]

        And it worked pretty well until DirectX performance eventually superseded it. Many developers never used OpenGL, prefering GLide in the 3DFX days or DirectX later on.

        • Many developers never used OpenGL, prefering GLide in the 3DFX days or DirectX later on.

          Many developers had no access to OpenGL; NT came with OpenGL 1.x software-only, and in the 3DFX days they supported only MiniGL, which was a subset of OpenGL which was sufficient to run Quake (and which was created specifically for that purpose.) Unless your game was developed on an SGI machine, like Quake, you probably didn't have OpenGL.

      • Re:RIP (Score:4, Informative)

        by AC-x ( 735297 ) on Monday December 14, 2020 @03:26AM (#60828256)

        and was considered easier to work with than OpenGL.

        Didn't D3D have a bit of a bad reputation for ease of use earlier in its life? Certainly John Carmack had a thing or two to say about it [rmitz.org].

        • I logged in for the first time in a long time to post this but then saw yours.

          It's a strange time when people think old versions of directx were easy to use, rather than being shoved down everyone's throat.

          In that era Microsoft had a lot more power and control than they do now. They were still in a boom phase and had yet to be humbled from their hubris.

        • What do you mean early in its life? :-)

          D3D was a mess, but it was certainly better than the alternatives.

          • D3D was a mess, but it was certainly better than the alternatives.

            When D3D came on the scene there were only really three other APIs being used, OpenGL, GLIDE, and whatever PowerVR used. OpenGL was superior to Direct3D until they had been revising it for years, while the other APIs were hardware-specific. And 3dfx promoted MiniGL (the Quake-supporting OpenGL subset) to a first class citizen in short order, which is to say that they released and maintained it. After my original VooDoo card I went to a Permedia 2 card which supported OpenGL directly.

            So no, D3D was not bette

            • OpenGL was a support shitshow which may or may not work on a graphics card. Direct3D was the first API that actually enjoyed some sort of universal support. So yes it was better than the alternatives.

              Though I agree about the ease of use. But something being easy doesn't make it better.

        • D3D was a fuckfest and everyone I know hated it until somewhere around 7, or possibly 9. Until 7 IIRC you couldn't even plot a pixel on the display without using GDI, there was no cooperation between Direct3D and DirectDraw. And while you could mix DirectVideo and Direct3D, there was no synchronization there, so if you were moving around 3D characters on top of a video stream, they would be out of sync. You could see this e.g. in Final Fantasy VII for PC, where cloud rides an elevator.

          From what I hear it is

    • Re:RIP (Score:4, Funny)

      by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <gameboyrmh&gmail,com> on Monday December 14, 2020 @12:10AM (#60827890) Journal

      Run dxdiag to pay respects.

      • This made me curious how dxdiag looks in Win10, if it still included.
        It looks exactly like always

  • If I understand the Wikipedia article for the history of DirectX correctly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX), then the actual developer for the first DirectX APIs was Craig Eisler while Alex St. John and Eric Engstrom were its chief evangelists to the gaming industry.

  • Revisionist History (Score:5, Interesting)

    by arQon ( 447508 ) on Monday December 14, 2020 @01:28AM (#60828082)

    Par for the course in an obit, but still: "Launched in 1995, DirectX wowed game developers"? Hell no. Nobody liked it: it took even more work to use than OGL, was much less capable, every new revision came with random breaking changes (for example, changing the texel offset from (0.5, 0.5) to (0,0)) that required either often-massive rewrites or staying on the previous version and losing access to any features in the newer version.

    DX *did* eventually become a (much) better platform than Glide and then OGL, but it wasn't until DX7, many many years later. DX succeeded because of a combination of MS-standard tactics: e.g. MS offered to act as the publisher for some Windows games, but ONLY if they were written in DX rather than OGL; hardware-accelerated GL drivers were kept out of the base Windows distribution while DX drivers were rolled into it; and so on.

    MS went out of its way to kill OGL because they didn't own it, and they understood that platform lock-in was worth a fortune to them. By that metric, DX certainly succeeded, and to this day remains a critical piece of Windows' dominance, with WINE/Proton/etc still so far behind that they just don't matter. And likewise, to this day, despite Khronos having finally gotten its act together (their mishandling OGL is what allowed DX9 to make it almost completely irrelevant), they still built their own DX12 in response to Vulkan rather than go with a standard that would have allowed even a single grain of sand to slip their fingers, because the vendor lock-in is still a critical part of the business strategy.

    It's always saddening when skilled people in our industry die young, but their achievements don't need to be inflated with dishonest praise. DX began life as a total shitshow, and only survived long enough to eventually become good because of how MS handled it from a business perspective, not because it was some wonderful panacea.

    (DirectSound though, that was a genuinely-valuable step forward, and technically part of DirectX too, though people - and journalists especially - really only mean D3D when they say DirectX).

    • Re:Revisionist History (Score:5, Informative)

      by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Monday December 14, 2020 @03:03AM (#60828222)

      Indeed. The running joke was that Microsoft never got anything right until the third version.

      Microsoft bought RenderMorphics in 1995, renamed their shity 3D Reality Lab [wikipedia.org] API to Direct3D, shoved it down game developers throats even though we signed a petition that we wanted OpenGL support, and after enough complaining about how utter crap it was, especially from John Carmack's plan in 1996 [bluesnews.com], D3D finally got good enough with DirectX 5 but didn't start to take off until DirectX 7 as you mentioned.

      Microsoft did very little innovation [dwheeler.com] in the 80's and 90's.

      Worse, Microsoft refused to support DirectX5 on WinNT 4.0 trying sell the inferior Windows 95 and Windows 98 as the "gaming OS" before coming to their senses and dropping it when they rebranded Windows NT 5.0 as Windows 2000 [wikipedia.org] after the clusterfuck of Windows ME.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • DirectX lets MS go faster than having to grapple with committees.

        That's really quite false. Committees never held back OpenGL. Vendors simply created their own extensions, which eventually became part of the spec (or not) through mass adoption. The canonical example of which I am aware is SGIS_MULTITEXTURE, which became ARB_multitexture. SGI didn't have to get permission from anyone to implement it, they just did it.

    • Not to mention: anyone who describes Windows as a loser in the gaming industry at the time, as the article states, is totally wrong on that point.

      Apart from consoles, Windows was THE predominant PC gaming platform in its day. There was no alternative. DirectX was one of several competing products pushing gaming forward, but Microsoft was the funding and organizational juggernaut that played the biggest role in getting directs to succeed.

    • Every word you wrote is wrong.

      1) DirectX was very well-received, because it gave game developers a shot at benefiting from the massive marketing push Windows 95 was undergoing at the time. At a time when major Windows updates literally have to be forced on users, it's hard to imagine people lining up at computer stores to buy Windows 95, but that's how significant Win95 was and how successful MS was at pushing it.

      2) Direct3D was not part of DirectX at the time Eric, Alex, and Craig were developing it. It

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        DirectX helped speed the adoption of Windows. Because remember, back in 95, the problem with games was DOS. Every game had to have every driver for every graphics card and sound card and input device. And network, if you needed it, and high-res graphics if you want to escape the 640x480 256 color limit of VGA.

        Sure, there were universal VESA BIOS libraries that made life less complex and let you basically go as high as the monitor allowed - 800x600, 1024x768 at 256, 64k or even 24 bit color was possible if

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mrbax ( 445562 )

      You are conflating DirectX and Direct3D

    • That's not correct. DirectX certainly did woe developers. Was it hard to program for? Absolutely, but the end result was far more likely to run than any attempt to hack together OpenGL which may or may not be supported by some graphics card. Early directx also had the benefit of providing a unified API for inputs, and while Direct3D was a bucket of shit, at least it was a single bucket of shit that had to be dealt with which was a welcome change from dealing with multiple buckets of shit with varying levels

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
      You're talking about 3d rendering. But back in 1995 most games didn't use 3d, and almost no home PCs had 3d acceleration in hardware. I think the original purpose of DirectX was for 2d graphics and sound, replacing the direct hardware access that DOS allowed. From the article, it seems that the early DirectX was what this guy created. Direct3D came a bit later.

    • Par for the course in an obit, but still: "Launched in 1995, DirectX wowed game developers"? Hell no. Nobody liked it: it took even more work to use than OGL, was much less capable

      You are conflating DirectX with Direct3D.

      Direct3D did in fact suck rocks until about version 9, but it also didn't actually exist until version... 3? of DirectX. DirectX started out IIRC with DirectInput, DirectVideo, DirectSound, and DirectDraw. And those features were all fairly well welcomed by game developers, and generally a big improvement on what came before, which was nothing standardized.

      Before Direct3D was a thing, Microsoft did have an OpenGL software renderer which shipped with Windows NT, but i

      • This! From a consumer perspective, DirectX was a revolution. Before DirectX, there was no high performance graphics on Windows, since the normal Windows API's (GDI) were way too slow. So even 2D games were extremely limited on Windows before DirectX, essentially limited to things like Minesweeper and Solitaire. What DirectX did initially was basically just to open up the frame buffer to the application in a standard API way, so the application could write directly to the buffer without having to call a func
  • It was a lot better than WinG which seemed to come and go in a matter of months and an MSDN drop or two.
  • The only time the comments are praising anything remotely related to Microsoft, it's when someone dies.

  • I read this obit in the WSJ the other day and I was reminded of the computer room in my high-school growing up. The teacher who ran that set up always scoffed at computer games and even banned them on some machines to the point of switching them off if you were in the middle of writing code for one. Sounds to me like the people who ran the Windows development team were of the same mindset. I wonder how they both see things now given that computer games is a multi-billion dollar market.

  • "His death was due to medical complications from an accident in the lab, after dropping a monitor on his foot."
    No joke!

    That is an obscure and tragic way to go. RIP

    https://oltnews.com/friends-remember-microsoft-renegade-eric-engstrom-who-suggested-a-directx-console-venturebeat

    • And here I thought that being a programmer was nice and safe (apart from the inevitable obesity that comes from too much snacking and Mt. Dew)...
  • OpenGL is way cooler because it uses "mix" instead of "lerp". The latter sounds like a linear combination of "herp" and "derp". https://www.instagram.com/p/CI... [instagram.com]

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