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What I find fascinating, in general, is Apple's rise as a gaming powerhouse. Take SpriteKit. It didn't exist until it was announced at WWDC 2013. Up until that
by Arjuna 12y ago
What I find fascinating, in general, is Apple's rise as a gaming powerhouse.
Take SpriteKit. It didn't exist until it was announced at WWDC 2013. Up until that point, the functionality offered by it was largely either hand-rolled by the developer, or achieved via framework (e.g., Cocos2D). I think Apple realized that they could capture more mind-share and confidence if they offered their own first-party framework offering.
Fast-forward a year later, and we have an enhanced SpriteKit (i.e., light sources, field forces, per-pixel physics, inverse kinematics), and of course the newly-announced SceneKit (3D scene rendering for casual games), Swift and Metal... all within a year!
With regard to Metal, Tim Sweeney had this to say after the Zen Garden app demo:
"There are thousands of objects being rendered here in a scene that we couldn't have dreamed of building, prior to Metal delivering a 10 fold increase in rendering efficiency. To have this level of graphics capability on iPhone and on iPad now is a stunning breakthrough. We're proud to have been a part of it. Of course, we'd love to share this with you, so as soon as iOS 8 is available, we'll be making Zen Garden available in the App Store for free."
- _random_ 12y agoYes, it's like watching history repeat itself. Apple is the new pre-20xx Microsoft, Metal is the new DirectX, Swift it the new VB(A/Script).
- blazespin 12y agoSwift is hardly VB. Swift is a modern functional language competitive with Java. It's far more complex than Objective-C. The threading model in Swift utilizes GCD and Closures versus the "perform selector in background" semantics of ObjC. Not for junior engineers.
- Pxtl 12y agoA PC vendor-specific high-level language? VB is the obvious comparison. Sure Swift is a better language, but it fills the same niche as VB - a platform has a difficult API and they want a more productive language, so they make something very high level using popular practices of the day, custom made to map tightly to their platform. It's just the popular practices in that niche in VB's day were things like Delphi and Tcl/TK, whereas Swift comes out in the day of Java/C#/Golang.
- hershel 12y agoThey can use a simple subset.
- pharaohgeek 12y agoObjective-C supports GCD just fine. In fact, I make use of that far more often than "perform selector..." and I'd say I'm probably not in the minority on this.
- danieldk 12y agoNo. There is a huge difference in that Apple has strong competitors (Google, Microsoft, Amazon), while Microsoft didn't at the time. Since Android now holds the vast majority of the mobile market in many regions, game engines have to support multiple APIs and cannot just switch to Metal. While around ~2000 pretty much everyone was only doing Direct X. Obviously, this is only good for users. There wouldn't be much incentive for Apple to come with Metal if they had 97% of the market. And the ball is now in Google's court to outdo Apple.