17 ms·

Ugggggh. As if graphics support on macOS weren't middling enough already. It's like they're trying to become as irrelevant as possible in that area. I could un

• coldtea 8y ago
  >All they'll accomplish is further killing off the already-small presence they have in the gaming space. In the AAA game space you mean. Else, in the casual gaming space, iOS is perhaps the most popular platform -- and the new integration effort means all those games will be able to run on macOS as well soon.
  • stuaxo 8y ago
    Sure, but this makes it a right pain in the arse to bring over apps from other platforms.
  • mikenew 8y ago
    And those games are horrible. Almost all of them are built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted. The biggest difference between those games and gambling is that you don't carry a slot machine in your pocket. For the most part the only exceptions to that are the games that were ported from desktop.
    • coldtea 8y ago
      >And those games are horrible. They work fine for me -- both as implementation and as gameplay. >Almost all of them are built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted. I think you confused casual gaming with Zynga or something. I was referring to smaller, non-AAA megatitles. Could be anything from a platform game, to Angry Birds, Monument Valley, Threes, Letterpress, racing games, RPGs and so on...
      • phkahler 8y ago
        I played the fuck out of Angry Birds - on Android. How exactly does forcing developers to adopt a platform specific API help anyone? That was a rhetorical question BTW, don't even try to answer it. Apple are being arrogant as fuck with this.
        • coldtea 8y ago
          >How exactly does forcing developers to adopt a platform specific API help anyone? Well, platform specific APIs aren't lowest-common-denominator affairs, and get support for native platform capabilities faster (plus can be more optimized).
          • phkahler 8y ago
            I understand their benefits. But why refuse to support standards as well? I don't think Apple is short on resources.
            • coldtea 8y ago
              I think because then you don't give developers the extra motivation to use your platform APIs.
              • phkahler 8y ago
                That just means the benefits don't outweigh the down side - lack of cross platform API, new learning curve to climb.
      • mikenew 8y ago
        I'm not saying there aren't decent games on iOS. You can find gems like Monument Valley, Florence, or, as I mentioned, the games ported from other platforms like Limbo, Terraria, and so on. But take a look at the top charts on the iOS app store and compare that to the top games on Steam. With few exceptions, the games on iOS are riddled with ads, microtransactions, and are designed to be as addictive as possible. The point is that the kind of games that thrive on the app store tend to be exploitative and low quality. Desktop gaming isn't immune from that, but it's a dramatically better platform.
    • itronitron 8y ago
      >> built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted I guess that explains why they are on Apple devices in the first place.
    • LoSboccacc 8y ago
      “99% of everything is shit” There are plenty great games. It help to source them from a gaming community you trust.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • ksec 8y ago
      PUBG Mobile is one of the best game I have played in a long time. And it doesn't cost me a penny. Nor do I have to pay to win. ( Actually I may have to upgrade my phone to play better ) But not every game are gambling. Fortnite seems to be doing great. And that shouldn't be a pay to win game.
      • mikenew 8y ago
        PUBG was ported from desktop. It originally started out as an ARMA 2 mod, was turned into PUBG, and only much later ported over to mobile. It's a perfect example of the kind of game that can come out of the desktop gaming community. You don't get games like PUBG, Minecraft, Starcraft, Terraria, Civ, Kerbal, and so on without desktop gaming. The games that grow out of the app store ecosystem are games like Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, etc. I'm not saying good games don't exist on the platform, I'm saying the platform is conducive to low quality games. Almost all of the great games on the app store did not grow out of the platform.
        • ksec 8y ago
          That I certainly agree. But I do think the future are Games built on top of Game engine. Unreal seems to have a massive improvement changelog every 6 months and if Unity didn't exist I did doubt how anyone is going to compete within a reasonable budget. Game Engine Choices would become the old day of OpenGL vs DirectX. No one sane would write their own game from scratch.
        • Marazan 8y ago
          Woah now, Clash Royale is a good game that is skill driven. People take level 1 accounts into legendary arena which shows that skill dominates money. How on earth the devs at Supercell tricked management into making a skill rather than money based game is genuinely a mystery to me.
    • jernfrost 8y ago
      You talk of a subset. A lot of casual games on iOS a very good: Cut the rope, Angry Birds, Bad Piggies, Simple Rockets. Civilization for iPad was very good. I can't remember all the stuff I've played but a lot of games are not the candy crush kind. Also a lot went wrong when Apple opened up for ads and in game purchases.
  • adamredwoods 8y ago
    Additionally, I don't think indie developers have loads of time on their hands to port their niche games over to a new technology. I can see Unity supporting Metal, but smaller platforms (jMonkeyEngine) will have a slower adoption rate, and in that time hopefully open-source middleware will come out to handle legacy APIs.
    • pjmlp 8y ago
      Indie engines like Ogre3D just need to add a new backend to their already backend agnostic engine.
  • sparky_ 8y ago
    I don't expect there will ever be an AAA game presence on macOS at this point, given so few of their machines offer dedicated GPUs anymore. And even in cases where they are available, for example Macbook Pros, the cost difference involved in stepping up from an integrated GPU to an entry-level dedicated card is greater than the cost of buying an Xbox or PlayStation.
    • pjmlp 8y ago
      Which none of them support either Vulkan or OpenGL.
      • rockdoe 8y ago
        XBoxes and PlayStations have been getting more game ports than macOS tho, doesn't take a genius to figure out why.
        • pjmlp 8y ago
          Consoles always had more game ports that other computer systems. Having a fixed set of hardware to target is a dream.
• endorphone 8y ago
  "But by no means to they have the clout to coerce developers into their own bespoke graphics API that doesn't work anywhere else" To be fair, the overwhelming majority of game shops develop on engines, and leave the engines to deal with the platforms. Unreal Engine, Unity, etc, support Metal, among others.
  • RobLach 8y ago
    Every game developer I know turns off the metal rendering pipeline and uses the much more stable and refined OpenGL one unless getting every tiny bit of performance needs to be squeezed out. I’ve witnessed plenty of last minute builds be saved by a Unity game dev on a Mac just flipping their renderer settings.
    • ianlevesque 8y ago
      Sounds like this might be the incentive Unity needs to fix their Metal implementation.
      • RobLach 8y ago
        I don't think it's much of an incentive. According to Valve's hardware surveys roughly 3% of Steam's market is MacOS. Those type of numbers are similar across different distribution platforms that a Unity game dev will target. It'll be hard to nudge it away from low priority with that share. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
        • the6threplicant 8y ago
          The other figure to look at is the amount of money spent. If it's similar to the hardware percentage then you're right, if on the other hand, macOS users spend more on games then a rethink is in order.
          • 8y ago
• Sephr 8y ago
  Fortunately you can still use Vulkan on iOS and Mac OS through MoltenVK[1], a Vulkan implemention in Metal. [1] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK
  • _bxg1 8y ago
    Sure, but the whole point of both Vulkan and Metal is to bring out more performance by being lower-level. I'd assume that at least part of that benefit is lost when you use something like this.
    • chuckdries 8y ago
      It's still way faster than opengl in some senarios
      • bilbo0s 8y ago
        Way faster in most scenarios actually. I'll give it that. (Any scenario I've tested anyway.) But it's also more difficult for the lay programmer to use as well.
        • SolarNet 8y ago
          Just use a vulkan implementation of opengl. OpenGL -> Vulkan -> Metal I can feel the performance gains already.
    • opencl 8y ago
      A lot of the point of Vulkan is not having to rewrite your entire graphics stack for every OS you want to target.
      • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        Isn't that kind of the point of OpenGL?
• lewisinc 8y ago
  Well, at least in the Rust ecosystem there is https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx which provides backends for Vulcan, Direct X 12, Metal and OpenGL. I'm not sure it's super relevant outside of the Rust ecosystem right now, but it's worth spreading the word around of such solutions.
  • drb91 8y ago
    How is the cross api shader support?
    • oregontechninja 8y ago
      Surprisingly good. My tests have run across properly across 4 os's without much change. I can't verify for Apple though.
      • oneweekwonder 8y ago
        > across 4 os's windows, gnu/linux, android; and what other os?
  • kvark 8y ago
    https://github.com/gfx-rs/portability https://github.com/gfx-rs/portability may be relevant out side of Rust, since it's a linkable C library.
• sundvor 8y ago
  Apple must truly hate gaming, or suffer from a serious case of Not Invented Here with their Metal stuff. As if any serious gaming studio would target Metal which doesn't run on Windows. In fact, they couldn't get their act together, keep with current versions, and as a result titles like Elite Dangerous were being shut down anyway. Reason: OpenGL stuck on an old version without support of compute shaders. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/424243-Important-Mac-announcement https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/424243-Importan... https://support.frontier.co.uk/kb/faq.php?id=228 https://support.frontier.co.uk/kb/faq.php?id=228
  • kayoone 8y ago
    To be fair, most games today are built using Unity3D, Unreal Engine etc, which all support Metal already. Hardly anyone writes their own game engines these days, and if they do they probably have the resources to support Metal. Overall still a bummer though.
    • kbwt 8y ago
      > most games today are built using Unity3D, Unreal Engine etc On PC: Maybe by number of games, but not by the number of players. (I count Fortnite as an outlier because it's technically not built on a third-party engine)
      • piva00 8y ago
        So based on number of players, what is the most used engine today if not UE nor Unity? There's LoL, Dota 2 and Overwatch using their custom engines with huge numbers of players but... What else? CS:GO?
        • sgift 8y ago
          Battlefield, CoD, AC, all the sports titles, GTA. More or less everything build by one of the big three uses their own in-house engine.
• euos 8y ago
  And where is Vulcan standard? Windows games use DX. iOS is Metal. Android Open GL, ES, etc. Gaming consoles have proprietary APIs. I would very much prefer games to use Metal on macOS (Starcraft2 is much smoother on the same hardware)
  • pjmlp 8y ago
    On Khronos dreams, even on Android which was adopted on version 7, is not worthwhile to display on the developer's dashboard. https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/ https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/ And good luck finding a Vulkan version beyond 1.0, with extensions that work properly across all mobile devices. http://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/vulkansupport.php#android_devices http://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/vulkansupport.php#android_devices You get a spectrum all the way from 1.0.0 up to 1.0.66, with Vulkan 1.1 promised for Android P devices only.
  • jhasse 8y ago
    Nintendo Switch
• skocznymroczny 8y ago
  I believe, as of now, there are more AAA games running Metal than there are running Vulkan. Pretty much every new macOS release is running Metal now, meanwhile a game running Vulkan on PC is considered a rarity.
  • roel_v 8y ago
    Because on PC, there are working alternatives.
• rsp1984 8y ago
  All they'll accomplish is further killing off the already-small presence they have in the gaming space. That of course depends on the definition of "gaming space". The classical desktop gaming space, Apple was never a player in it. They simply don't care about it. Hence why they treated OpenGL on macOS the way they did. But: Apple is arguably the biggest player in the mobile gaming space. That's what they care about. So instead of spending a large amount of money to attract a low number of AAA desktop titles to their OS they just tap into the vast (game-)developer base that they already have in iOS and make it easy for them to deploy and sell their games on macOS too [1]. The move to deprecate OpenGL and OpenCL in favor of Metal makes total sense in that regard. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/apple-is-bringing-the-best-of-ios-to-macos/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/apple-is-bringing-the-best...
• gpdpocketer 8y ago
  I've been using a cross-platform GUI framework/engine to do app development on all the platforms: Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android - and it has been a joy to deploy one app on all of these systems. One of the reasons this has been so feasible has been the fact that the engine (MOAI) uses GL ES to manage the framebuffer itself - giving the same look and feel on all platforms the host runs. This has been, honestly, revolutionary in terms of building a single app that runs everywhere. This now becomes more complicated because the engine has to be modified for Apple platforms to use Metal, and represents another fork/splinter in the unity of the host itself. I wonder if their decision to use a non-standard graphics API is due to them wanting to make this style of development a lot more difficult in the future - i.e. are Apple passively antagonizing the cross-platform framework builders in order to establish an outlier condition for their platforms? The cynic in me says yes, of course this is what they are doing ..