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> The new rendering architecture will also allow companies working on console ports to more efficiently port the engine and offer our users the possibility of r
by shmerl 7y ago
> The new rendering architecture will also allow companies working on console ports to more efficiently port the engine and offer our users the possibility of running their games on the most popular game consoles (something we will, unfortunately, never be able to offer officially due to legal reasons, thus forcing us to cooperate with companies porting it on their own).
I didn't quite understand that part. What legal reasons prevent them from making ports for consoles? Do consoles ban open source projects?
Also, are they planning to use some translations layers like for DX12 and GNM from Vulkan when working with Xbox and PlayStation? Would be nice if gfx-rs could offer a GNM target for the Vulkan portability option.
Alternatively, Sony and MS can of course start offering an option to use native Vulkan, as they should have from the beginning.
- Negitivefrags 7y agoYou are not allowed to publish any information about console APIs. That is part of the agreement for getting access to the SDK. You can't publish any code that calls non-standard APIs. So therefore any code that interacts with those APIs cannot be open source. You would have to publish a seperate extension to the engine that is not open source and make it only available to those who have signed the Developer Licence Agreement for the platform. Depending on what licence you chose or how the code is structured that might break your own open source licence.
- shmerl 7y ago> You are not allowed to publish any information about console APIs. That is part of the agreement for getting access to the SDK. Sounds very much like paranoid '80s - '90s approach where everything including development tools was viewed as some kind of super guarded secret. But I guess incumbent consoles are stuck in that mindset. They should realize it's been a different century for two decades already. Hiding an API is not helping anyone.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 7y agoTheir console APIs already offer the lowlevel control from Vulkan and are much older than Vulkan, so no, it is not from the begining.
- shmerl 7y agoIt's not lower than Vulkan (Vulkan pretty much matches GPU functionality already). Lower would be GPU assembly or machine code. And older isn't the reason not to offer Vulkan for developers. Nintendo managed to figure that out. So it's not "no", unless they are dumb and stuck in extreme lock-in mentality.
- pjmlp 7y agoOver 50% of games on the Switch use Unity, with the remaining ones using Unreal or in-house middleware built on top of NVN. Very few Switch titles actually use Vulkan. Just like GL ES 1.0 on the PS 1, it is more a box to tick than anything else.
- shmerl 7y agoIt doesn't matter what they use. We are talking about engines themselves here, like Godot. And they shouldn't be wasting time and resources working around lock-in stupidity. Offering Vulkan for developers is the right thing to do for every platform. I.e. targeting Switch for them aligns well with their current Vulkan work. Targeting PS or Xbox - not really, they'll need to rely on translation (like gfx-rs), if one even exists. I'm not sure if anyone implemented Vulkan → GNM translation yet.