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As a long-time professional game engine programmer, it is hard for me to see consternation over things like this, and avoid judging it as mainly ignorance. The
by psyc 8y ago
As a long-time professional game engine programmer, it is hard for me to see consternation over things like this, and avoid judging it as mainly ignorance. The amount of code in an engine that needs to touch the graphics API is tiny. A handful of methods for device init, filling buffers, uploading shaders, setting state, and saying "draw!" All of the graphics API code can easily fit in one medium-sized source file. As a proportion of the whole engine, it's very small. As a proportion of the whole game or app, it's negligible. It's also boilerplate. There are only so many ways to copy a stream of structured data into a buffer.
Legacy software, blah, blah, blah. No legacy software runs forever, and least of all on Apple platforms. Who cares.
- p0nce 8y agoI'm one of the happy persons about this move, because my competition use OpenGL on Mac and I just use software rendering. It was easy to see this deprecation coming...
- TheCabin 8y agoProfessional game engines are not the only application for OpenGL, though. Many people would like to build cross-platform software without using major abstraction layers, such as game engines. This could be research software, prototypes, small tools in general.. -- I think there is a long list. For these people life might get harder.
- pjmlp 8y agoQuite true. People in FOSS friendly circles really don't get the games development culture, IP management or the contracting business related to ports.
- CodesInChaos 8y agoGaming is all about legacy software, especially single player games. As a gamer I'm very happy that almost all older games still work on Windows today (either directly or using an emulator like DOSBox). (Of course that does not mean that the OS needs built in OpenGL support. If you can convince an old game to use some kind of OpenGL-Metal compatibility wrapper without needing access to the game's source code or support from the original developer, that's fine with me as well.)