Apple even said a few years back when they were introducing Metal that this reality is why a migration to Metal shouldn’t be a big deal. The panic surrounding the deprecation of OpenGL seems disproportional to the impact it will actually have on individual game developers. Really, people just want a chance to bitch about Apple prioritizing progress on their platforms instead of valuing backward compatibility.
“Deprecating the widely-supported open standard, which we haven’t maintained properly on our platform for years in favor of a proprietary graphics stack we made” is a really interesting definition of “progress”
If Apple wants to push the responsibility of writing graphics compatibility layers onto The Community ™, there’s nothing stopping them from doing that. But we don’t have to applaud them for it.
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Yup, agreed. I tend to carry water for Apple or Nvidia more than most people who get het up about anything that’s not running fuck all whatever you want on x86 Windows because they’re a couple of the only companies really pushing the envelope lately and their technical decisions are usually much better than that perspective would have them seem, but Metal is a clear GSync situation of having their own standard because they feel like it, not really defensible
If it were Vulkan it would be fine really (for all the reasons outlined above)
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not to be a mean mod about this or anything but you might want a thread dedicated to this mac talk or smth
unless it’s not just one topic I can’t tell my eyes glazed over
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big mac thread
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nah it’s cool, I’m too angry to keep arguing about this shit anymore
WAIT WERE Y’ALL ARGUING I LITERALLY DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE
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I was just like hmm this sure seems technical and not something I know at all
bout what people who like macs arguing always looks lile really
I’m pissed off about dropping OpenGL support because that’s going to fuck up a lot of important creative coding and pedagogical software. (I am hopeful that Broco’s proposed solution of OpenGL-as-middleware materializes in some form.)
At the same time, I kind of get why Apple developed Metal – the Vulkan API is a pain in the ass to work with, trying to position themselves against Khronos Group is probably not worth the effort, making Metal an open-standard runs the risk of it getting Khronos-ed, etc. – but the effect of this decision on computing at large kind of sucks. I feel like we’re about to enter another era of early-90s walled gardens, where all the worst fears about Direct3D come true but for both major platforms.
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apple have been signaling for a while now that they’re not really interested in remaining part of the broader x86 PC ecosystem if it doesn’t suit them – remember ARM macbooks are supposedly coming in the next couple years, and given all the Intel 10nm delays, it’s not clear whether these will replace the whole lineup or what – and this is another aspect of that, yeah.
again, deprecated is effectively what it has been since yosemite and it’s not clear when it’ll actually be removed. personally I’ve been on a combination of windows and linux since 2010 and am still pretty keen for apple to sell me some hardware I want again. I don’t see a scenario for myself personally where it’s a good idea to be totally outside of or totally inside of apple’s platforms.
they have always been brutal about forcing people to make sure that binary-compatible code is still newest-version-of-compiler-toolchain-compatible, which would be fine if they had a demonstrated commitment to preservation, but
FYI Vulkan and GLES compatibility layers already exist on Metal (MoltenVK and MoltenGL). I think there’s something for straight up GL but I don’t remember who makes it or what it’s called.
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words i’m hearing through the indie dev grapevine are generally that people are tired of apple’s bullshit consistently breaking their software and that it is not a worthwhile investment for them to keep continually updating their software builds in perpetuity based on Apple’s whims, especially as it is more difficult to support ports for Macs than Linux, for only twice the user base.
i’m predicting a lot of otherwise well intentioned and prepared developers are just going to pull out when this becomes mandatory.
(wouldn’t be surprised to see, say, zachtronics just shrug and go ‘welp, sorry, you can’t play spacechem anymore, bye’)
that may be true for extremely small or solo teams (which is understandable and too bad) but I think a lot of larger/midsize teams would much prefer to work on Macs in the first place and this still far outweighs the pain for them
Yeah, the only problem with MoltenGL is it’s commercial software. What’s missing right now is a free open-source version of that. The worst-case outcome here is that a free alternative takes years to eventually appear because nobody with the resources has the incentive to make that.
Apple is implying that they are currently building one for Safari’s WebGL:
Apple will have to decide whether to 1) release this MoltenGL alternative as open-source to make the transition easier for their developers, or 2) keep it closed-source to force everyone to Metal, 3) if too much chaos looms, Apple retains a third option of partially reversing themselves and quietly shipping the OpenGLES-on-Metal middleware at the iOS system level so that developer-facing APIs don’t change at all (after all, this has merely been a vague future deprecation announcement this week, nothing is set in stone yet and Apple might be partly testing the waters of how developers react).
The only thing that’s definitely changing is that OpenGL non-ES on Mac OS X (and, IMO, in general) is completely dead now. Any developers targeting that need to do a significant rewrite to target OpenGL ES instead, or abandon OS X completely. So OpenGL-targeting PC games are the legacy software that’s most likely to permanently drop out of the Apple ecosystem.
ANGLE has a WIP Metal backend.
I predict everyone’s just going to switch over to that; many are already using it for their Windows builds because OpenGL is too unstable on Windows because Microsoft fucking sucks.
This does absolutely nothing to help existing builds that will just stop working, though. Many devs are not going to bother updating, and that’s a fact.
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There’s not a directory for Metal in the ANGLE renderers directory, is it being developed in an fork for now?
I guess Google will need to add support for it for Chrome for Mac WebGL after the deprecation so it must be coming though. It’s interesting how web browsers turn out to be playing the key role in keeping OpenGL afloat (albeit only GL ES, not legacy GL).
Don’t worry Apple, I’ll be glad to see your fetid ecosystem slide back into its proprietary latrine.
Truly, there is no bottom to the depths of my contempt for Apple and I regret ever owning any single piece of hardware that they’ve made.
For my own part, I’ve had nothing but agony attempting to support OS X in the past, and this is an object lesson in the bullshit that keeps OS X a third-class platform.
I still remember when they took out Rosetta and it broke my VisualboyAdvance. God, OS X is a lame technology tarpit. Shame Apple is so high on the hog financially.
uh, yikes!
It’s really just a difference in philosophy. Apple doesn’t like baggage and they’re not shy to drop old technologies, and for the most part I think their timing has been pretty good about it.
It’s okay if you’re not into that though! There are many other options available for you!
TBH I’ve been living in the apple ecosystem for a long time and it’s been pretty good to me, and I don’t think this is going to make it go anywhere or fundamentally change the state of gaming on the mac (which is near non-existent anyway, it’s not the reason people buy macs). People like to raise a stink because it’s the era of reading headlines only and declaring the apocalypse. This will affect some people negatively, but nearly every decision does. OpenGL has never been great on the mac anyway!
Cool, if you want a platform that is defined by its technical debt and that celebrates its backward compatibility with software from 1992, there is a platform for you: it’s called Windows. Just support that and Mac users will continue to be just fine without you.
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