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"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
by 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 agoEvery 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 agoSounds like this might be the incentive Unity needs to fix their Metal implementation.
- RobLach 8y agoI 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 agoThe 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.
- Lievelingsduif 8y agoDo you have a source for that? Because I can't really find a figure. Genuinely curious.
- vvanders 8y agoNot everything that runs on OpenGL is a video game. Tons of applications out there that just won't have the budget to do a rewrite(and even fewer were probably setup with the right architecture if they were depending on OpenGL in the first place).
- endorphone 8y agoTrue, but they didn't remove OpenGL, they simply deprecated it (e.g. don't expect any updates to it, new tooling will not be built around it, etc). That shouldn't affect legacy apps.
- jakobegger 8y agoYes, and deprecation doesn’t mean a lot on the Mac. Apple often deprecates stuff and still leaves it in. They remove it only when there’s something to be gained. (eg. linking with the system-provided OpenSSL has been deprecated for years, but AFAIK they still ship it.)
- rarepostinlurkr 8y agoChicken and egg. If they remove it apps stop working, if apps don’t update they can’t remove it.
- xienze 8y agoI’m not so sure they’re worried about apps breaking. They’ve certainly stuck to the “no more 32bit iOS apps” thing.
- seandougall 8y agoApple can get away with that on iOS, but they're a lot more conservative with macOS. To expand on your example, I maintain a legacy app that is stuck in 32-bit land because it relies on the QuickTime framework. QuickTime has been deprecated for seven years, and the transition to 64-bit has been in progress for over a decade, and yet my legacy app runs just fine even under the Mojave beta. There are multiple time bombs lurking in that app, and one of these days I'm going to have to rewrite it from the ground up, but I've been astonished at how long it has lasted. Apple knows it would be bad karma to make a large number of legacy apps and games suddenly break on the Mac. They're not idiots; they have a perfectly good idea of the scale of mutiny that would ensue. So I'll eat my hat if OpenGL doesn't continue to work for at least the better part of the next decade.
- _bxg1 8y agoTrue. This is the only sane reasoning they could've had.