To port CryTek 3 and Unreal Engine 4 kind of engines to it?Originally Posted by Janika
To port CryTek 3 and Unreal Engine 4 kind of engines to it?
Exactly, as I mentioned, a lot of games are limited to DX9/GL2.1 because they were designed for consoles. When you abandon consoles or target the next generation of them (both meaning you should start developing now or you already started: see latest Unreal and CryEngine demos) you will want to target DX11/GL4 directly.
For example area lights, indirect illumination based on cone tracing needs realtime updatable volume datastructures of your environment which scream for GL4/DX11 (probably even compute shaders/OpenCL integration) and will be key features of next-gen games (graphics-wise). Why can't I research and develop such games on the Mac? Why don't I even get a OpenGL roadmap for the Mac to estimate whether I even can port my apps when they are finished in X month?
Maybe openGL 3.2 has all features Janika needs, but there are other devs that want to use more advanced features...
The issue is that Apple has to drive the market. They can't wait around for the manufacturers to come to them. The new unreal engine would had been a perfect project for Apple to invest some serious R&D dollars to get their OGL support updated to the current specification. With that introduce a "gaming" machine with specs that are between the iMac and Mac Pro. That is the mixings for a huge push to get apple into the gaming market.
Without doing something like that both consumers and manufacturers will continue to discredit OSX as a platform capable of pushing today's 3D graphics. I would say Apple really has no interest to enter that market, otherwise they would had.
Why port them o Mac? And how does this benefit Apple? It's for sure a joy for developers but not for the big business, unless the market share of Mac gaming is close enough to that of PC. When we talk about Mac gaming I think of Linux gaming too.
Actually I'm okay with OpenGL 2.1.Maybe openGL 3.2 has all features Janika needs, but there are other devs that want to use more advanced features...
But one thing, what makes Apple not creating their own rendering API? What if this was the case?
Right, Menzel. But I was thinking: wouldn't it be possible for developers to come up with great stuff using OpenGL 3 or earlier? If we roll back not such a long time ago, id Software did something amazing (at the time) with Doom 3. I remember how cool it was watching all those Doom 3 pre-release in-game videos and how hard it was to believe they were actual in-game. What was that? OpenGL 2.x?
Not that I am saying the features on OpenGL 4 are useless (much on the contary, see my other topic). But developers have always found creative solutions for technological "contraints" (such as MacOS OpenGL support). Personally, I really love the tesselation features, but I could do without them given those incredible lightning effects on Unreal Engine 4 (check also the Samaritan demo). Are those effects really exclusive to OpenGL 4?
Isn't this how it all begins? http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/0...ns-steam-port/
Apple is part of the Khronos Group. They have adopted AAC and H.264 (and Part 10) as their main video technologies. They have exchanged Firewire support to USB. I pretty much believe that Apple, today, is willing to stick to standards. Plus, OpenGL is way more developed than any other custom API, why reinvent the wheel?
One thing in that Facebook page that.. kind of smells bad: it compares a game performance under MS-Windows vs Mac OS-X. The issue with that comparison, is that those comparisons (atleast the ones I looked at) are using D3D under MS-Windows and GL under Mac.. so it is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Moreover, that Mac has GL3.2 is a really good sign. Although GL is up at 4.2 now, it is not like many games use GL4.x (i.e. D3D11) features as required..usually they are tacked on. Heck, D3D9 capabilities still rule the MS-Windows games world.. which corresponds to GL2.1 (mostly-ish). I can only think of a handful of games that require D3D10, and not a single one that requires D3D11... so....
On the other hand, Apple has a very anal mentality on GL... rather than just take the GL implementations from ATI or NVIDIA, they.. sprinkle their own apple-dust on top of it.. I would guess that the GLSL compiler in Apple is mostly-their-own-ish based off of LLVM.. but this is a guess.
On the other hand, I suspect (but do not know) that the GL implementation on Apple gizmos for Intel GPU might be better than Intel's... which does not say much really....
I remember reading that the management leadership at Apple really don't "care" about games so much, but considering the success of iOS, maybe that has changed..
On a related note, Unity is getting a Linux port.. which has far smaller market than Mac OS-X.. and Steam is on Apple ... also that is supposedly getting a port to Linux too...
Crazy world we live in.
The only other custom 3D API I'm aware of is Direct3D, so does this mean...??? Windows creator are not reinventing the wheel, they provide a proprietary API that works better for their platform and for 3D hardware in general. And if Apple is already writing their own OpenGL implementation, then I would suggest make their own API.Plus, OpenGL is way more developed than any other custom API, why reinvent the wheel?
I keep forgetting how judgemental the Internet can be.Sorry, but I didn't include Direct3D there. I meant those vendor specific APIs such as Glide. I am not really sure there are any notable ones out there (maybe PSGL?).
Yeah but Glide died very long ago.
If Apple can come up with a new API specific to their platform, that would be a better investment than having to try catching with OpenGL versions slowly. And then if there's a real demand on Mac gaming or any professional 3D applications, these can be ported to the new API. Like in the case of Direct3D, they want to support the platform they use the right API - in case of Windows, so I don't get "judged."
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