Hey guys! Hope you don’t want to keep playing the games you have on your macOS X computer!
Oh great. Now we are gonna have to get clarification every time a dev says “…straight to the metal…” And there might even be some lawsuits.
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Is there some reason this isn’t as insane as I, a non-programmer, think it is?
this is apple saying ‘we are breaking compatibilty with every piece of software that does not use our APIs, on our platforms.’ bear in mind people don’t really want to support macs to begin with right now.
this is completely bonkers.
I feel like it’s probably driven from an internal mandate to remove dependencies on any standards that are not directly controlled by Apple themselves.
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Apple hadn’t updated OpenGL in years anyway, and a deprecation isn’t an outright removal (they won’t be able to do that for a while without breaking stuff). it had been effectively deprecated since 2014 per their release cadence anyhow, it would’ve been very surprising if they decided to start patching it again.
It would be a lot better if they weren’t intent on backing a graphics API that no non-mobile apps have had any real rationale to adopt but there’s a good Vulkan->Metal layer at this point, the problem is that it’s not trivial for Unity games to be recompiled from OpenGL to Vulkan/Metal backends because a lot of them are on older versions of Unity and can’t be easily up-ported.
nevertheless, this is a good reminder that Wine is actually one of the most stable ways to maintain old PC games and graphics APIs, much moreso than officially sanctioned ports. arguably almost all pre-Unity Mac games are better preserved running through wine, and almost all non-Unity contemporary Mac games will just be updated to support this.
One of the only concrete outcomes of this will be to hurt desktop Linux (which has already lost a fair amount of support in the past couple years compared to 2014-5) because people will only support so many non-D3D graphics APIs; there’s enough money in the Mac ecosystem to pay for the app updates.
almost nobody other than John Carmack ever liked OpenGL in the first place and there are lots of problems with infinitely natively backwards compatible platforms.
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I’m predicting more support for ANGLE and the likes because nobody is going to support ANOTHER GRAPHICS API. Most games do not need ultra high performant APIs and those that did moved off of OpenGL to Vulkan awhile ago anyway. (Or even away from D3D! hi Doom)
WebGL and GLES are here to stay, whether people want it to or not.
also: something something unity is trash something something
Unity is technically kind of a mess and is questionably managed but has been very good at enabling cross-platform support and nothing else ever came close to acting like a Game Maker for 3D stuff
anyway I really feel like a lot of people freaking out about this are ignoring the fact that Apple has been treating OpenGL as deprecated for four years now
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10.14 is good if only for the ad-tech meltdown over the new safari stuff
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also the dark theme though like most of the past few years of advertised macOS features that falls square within “probably doesn’t need to be attached to a full platform update”
but yes, full credit to apple for being the only company powerful and willing enough to antagonize ad tech
Game developers who target the Mac while being clueless to anything that is going on in the Mac developer scene are infuriating. If you are choosing to target the Mac (or honestly, any Apple platform), do your research and if you’re not going to commit to the upkeep necessary to stay relevant on Apple platforms, get off our platform.
We don’t need more game developers shipping games that don’t even launch on a stock install of the OS because they either couldn’t be bothered or didn’t know they had to sign their executables.
We don’t need more game developers shipping a game called Untitled.app with a Wine logo icon that boils down to being a shell script that launches Wine, and then having those people act all surprised when shit doesn’t work in their game and they can’t do anything to fix it.
If you develop for the Mac, you are a “Mac developer”, and you are expected to do the bare minimum of what Mac developers do. Stay ahead of the curve or you’ll get left behind. You’re not exempt because you’re rendering 3D models instead of rendering table views.
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But what about that dark color scheme in XCode, y’all!
Eh? Eh?
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this is also a very good example of what unity does well so you don’t have to
like, say what you will, but that is their business model
Apple: You Will Eat the Dog Food
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the basic problem with being an indie game developer for macos in 2018 is that the system is probably going to cost considerably more than you will make back on it, even if you want to support it
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it’s like $300 to get a Craigslist Mac Mini
I’m sympathetic to people who try to do literally everything singlehanded but even that is workaroundable
Also I have totally built and signed Mac software for distribution from pirated VMs. They can’t be bothered to check their own licensing terms because they’re classy like that
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Considering the product hasn’t been updated since 2014, I wouldn’t wish that upon anybody, and it’s still ridiculously overpriced for what you’re getting.
In the grand scheme of things, I’m shocked that more people seem to be outraged about the Mac dropping OpenGL than iOS dropping OpenGL ES because unlike the Mac, people actually use iOS?
I mean this has been the running theme for all of the bad software the Mac has gotten over the last year: Mac users expect better because they’ve been spoiled for decades by passionate indie Mac devs who pour their souls into making the best software in the world, but the amount of effort required to meet our baseline of quality is disproportionate to the market that software elitists like myself represent.
My world view is that as (especially as an indie) developer, you should only ship things you can be proud of, and if the cost of that is shipping on fewer platforms, then please, by all means, get off the Mac.
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how about you stop using the mac instead
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As a Linux user fro the past 20 years I’m well familiar with bad ports. Wine ports aren’t too common anymore, at least, since people don’t really care about us. Heck, FTL still has issues with Pulseaudio and the opinion from the devs was a shrug. (a workaround exists, at least)
To be blunt this is a problem of toolings as much as it is people not being familiar with the target. People still developing on aging methodologies that are troublesome to port with. My gamedev hot take is that nobody that isn’t AAA should be developing a game directly to system APIs in 2018 unless they, themselves, are making an abstraction layer. Portability is too important to leave up to that. Use FNA, use Haxe, heck use Unity if you have to.
(FWIW for the dev framework I’m doing, ideally I would like to just build to a VM that automatically runs on the target platform without actually needing to rebuild for it each time. The CPU loss is minimal considering I’m using sub-5% to begin with.)
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iOS can’t truly drop support for OpenGL ES. Safari is committed to supporting WebGL forever.
I maintain that there’s less to this announcement than meets the eye because it’s so feasible to reinvent OpenGL on top of Metal anyway. What this means is merely that OpenGL will be middleware instead of a driver-supplied API. Apple is incentivized to get people targeting Metal directly for lock-in reasons and to be seen as disruptively innovating so they’re playing it up as “OpenGL is dead”, but it’s all fake drama.
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i’m actually rather convinced Apple deliberately degrades existing software on purpose to ‘clean the slate’ every so often, so to speak, so that only more dedicated developers stay on top of things.
long term it won’t matter. short term well there goes all your software bye~
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