Valve Open-Sources Their Direct3D To OpenGL Translation Layer

With Valve's Source Engine originally just targeting Direct3D, when initially porting their games to Linux and OS X they relied upon a hand-made Direct3D to OpenGL translation layer. In potentially assisting other game developers, Valve Software has now opened up this graphics translation layer.

ToGL is the name of this latest Valve project that was open-sourced last night and taken from their Dota 2 source tree. This translation layer targets just a subset of Direct3D 9.0c and also supports translating HLSL byte-code to OpenGL's GL Shading Language (GLSL). ToGL also provides some SM3 support with multiple render targets but no vertex texture fetching.

By itself ToGL won't do much but could prove to be useful for those porting their Direct3D engines to Linux. Whether or not it will be useful to Wine developers remains to be seen since their D3D9 support is now in relatively good shape. Valve has released ToGL under the MIT license.

ToGL can be found hosted at GitHub.com.