211–220 of 235 posts
So why DX12 and not Vulkan? It's time for MS to start helping the industry instead of proliferating lock-in and complicating things for engine developers.
AMD saves the day: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12552/amd-announces-real-time...
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> Adding a new rendering backend to a games engine is a trivial task You keep saying this, but it remains false. If it would have been so trivial, studios wouldn't have hard time adding such backends and wouldn't need to hire third party porting experts when they decide to do it. You can see how long it takes major engines like Unreal to make a fully functional backend (since features added to such engines are public…
It's trivial in the sense that it's low technical risk. I've not worked in the games for a while. At one company with an inhouse engine the rendering backend was initially DirectX9 written mostly by one person. He then implemented the Xbox360 backend. Another person did the backend for PS3 (OpenGL based). Don't have the exact timings it was ten years ago, but after the initial material, geometry lighting pipeline was…
The problem is not in the risk, but simply in the cost itself. It's an extra tax to pay. However quality can also suffer, see below.
> I can't speak for Epic, they are making an engine for every possible game and every possible rendering scene which is a harder problem than what we were doing. But the rendering backend isn't the hard part.
The story of Everspace illustrates my point. They were bitten by multiple issues in OpenGL backend of UE4, and it took Epic a long time to fix some of them. Their resources are limited, and they are more focused on more widespread backends obviously. Which is exactly the result lock-in proponents are trying to achieve.
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1 - Adding a new rendering backend to a games engine is a trivial task, when compared to the pile of features a game engine needs to support . I did not said it was a trivial task by itself alone. 2 - Check how many in the industry actually care about your 3D API freedom goals. Even Carmack now rather likes DX, in spite of his earlier opinions. 3 - Every big fish and major indie studios are using Unreal, Unity, CryEn…
All you said, doesn't change the fact that it's a substantial effort. Whether it's easier than other features is irrelevant to the point above. It's hard overall. So it's an extra cost for developers who need to spend time on it, and it's exactly the cost MS and other lock-in freaks are benefiting from, since it's increasing the difficulty of releasing cross platform games (one more difficult thing to address). The h…
Nowadays doing boring enterprise consulting, with focus on UI/UX.
Experience about reality, how people in the industry think, what those people actually consider as project costs.
Gamasutra articles are all available online. Try to find any postmosterm complaining about proprietary APIs on what went wrong section.
Experience, not demagogy.
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Aren't animated movies pretty much universally ray traced?
No-ish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar_RenderMan These days they're pretty much 100% path-traced. But most animated films out there in the history of 3d animation were rasterized.
The challenge of all of this was doing it using rasterization techniques, or integrating more realistic techniques using path tracing into a standard rasterization pipeline in a way that didn't kill performance. But now render farms a big enough and technology has advanced far enough that they can just path-trace everything.
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All you said, doesn't change the fact that it's a substantial effort. Whether it's easier than other features is irrelevant to the point above. It's hard overall. So it's an extra cost for developers who need to spend time on it, and it's exactly the cost MS and other lock-in freaks are benefiting from, since it's increasing the difficulty of releasing cross platform games (one more difficult thing to address). The h…
As I said, a Windows developer with Stockholm syndrome, that has experience how the games industry works. Nowadays doing boring enterprise consulting, with focus on UI/UX. Experience about reality, how people in the industry think, what those people actually consider as project costs. Gamasutra articles are all available online. Try to find any postmosterm complaining about proprietary APIs on what went wrong section…
I trust more the experience of those who actually work on games porting, and explain relevant difficulties they encounter. And no one says it's trivial. On the contrary, they say that rendering is the hardest part, and the most costly one to port. So it's very clear, that lock-in proponents who are against cross platform gaming (MS and Co) are benefiting from this hurdle and strengthen it by pushing their APIs.
See: https://boilingsteam.com/icculus-ryan-gordon-tells-us-everyt...
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As I said, a Windows developer with Stockholm syndrome, that has experience how the games industry works. Nowadays doing boring enterprise consulting, with focus on UI/UX. Experience about reality, how people in the industry think, what those people actually consider as project costs. Gamasutra articles are all available online. Try to find any postmosterm complaining about proprietary APIs on what went wrong section…
> Experience about reality, how people in the industry think, what those people actually consider as project costs. I trust more the experience of those who actually work on games porting, and explain relevant difficulties they encounter. And no one says it's trivial. On the contrary, they say that rendering is the hardest part, and the most costly one to port. So it's very clear, that lock-in proponents who are agai…
Someone that would actually loose this source of income if you had what you wish for, thus be forced to search for other kind of consulting services in the games industry.
Again, not understanding the industry works, plain demagogy.
When a games developer sees a 3D API manual for the first time, their first thought is "What cool games can I achieve with it?" not "Is it portable?".
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> Experience about reality, how people in the industry think, what those people actually consider as project costs. I trust more the experience of those who actually work on games porting, and explain relevant difficulties they encounter. And no one says it's trivial. On the contrary, they say that rendering is the hardest part, and the most costly one to port. So it's very clear, that lock-in proponents who are agai…
Ryan Gordon, which makes a living porting AAA games to Linux since Loki Games days. Someone that would actually loose this source of income if you had what you wish for, thus be forced to search for other kind of consulting services in the games industry. Again, not understanding the industry works, plain demagogy. When a games developer sees a 3D API manual for the first time, their first thought is "What cool games…
He can find what to do, working in engine development directly.
So far you were engaging in demagoguery about how trivial porting is and justification of lock-in, even when facts to the contrary were shown to you directly. I see no point in taking your word on it, against those who are actually known to be working in this field.
> When a games developer sees a 3D API manual for the first time, their first thought is "What cool games can I achieve with it?"
Until their publisher or shareholder knocks on their heads and stops their cross platform releases because of costs of using more APIs. Goal (of lock-in supporters) achieved.
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It's trivial in the sense that it's low technical risk. I've not worked in the games for a while. At one company with an inhouse engine the rendering backend was initially DirectX9 written mostly by one person. He then implemented the Xbox360 backend. Another person did the backend for PS3 (OpenGL based). Don't have the exact timings it was ten years ago, but after the initial material, geometry lighting pipeline was…
> It's trivial in the sense that it's low technical risk. The problem is not in the risk, but simply in the cost itself. It's an extra tax to pay. However quality can also suffer, see below. > I can't speak for Epic, they are making an engine for every possible game and every possible rendering scene which is a harder problem than what we were doing. But the rendering backend isn't the hard part. The story of Everspa…
Don't know exactly what issues Everspace had with the UE4, but you want to have a fun night go out with some Epic licensees and get them to tell you war stories of issues they have had when they tried to do something which Epic hadn't done in their games. You're paying Epic for the "battle testing" and often they didn't fight those battles.
Part of the reason I left the games industry is that once you work at studio with an internal engine it is extremely frustrating to work on AAA games without the freedom to walk over to the engine programmer and get them to move the engine closer to what you need.
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I'm not sure it's fair to describe those as hacks. Those techniques are also used for animated movies, which take many CPU-years to render. Those "hacks" are used even when artist have huge amounts of hardware, no real-time constraints, and need extremely high quality. Techniques other than raytracing have an artistic place, not merely a pragmatic one.
Aren't animated movies pretty much universally ray traced?
https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/21/4446606/how-pixar-changed...
Nowadays ray tracing is common, but as recently as five years ago it was rare. Not all high-quality animation is ray traced.
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> It's trivial in the sense that it's low technical risk. The problem is not in the risk, but simply in the cost itself. It's an extra tax to pay. However quality can also suffer, see below. > I can't speak for Epic, they are making an engine for every possible game and every possible rendering scene which is a harder problem than what we were doing. But the rendering backend isn't the hard part. The story of Everspa…
Sure, there is effort involved, but from my point of view it's a small one (a couple of man months on a project with 50+ coders). I'm going to have to make adjustments between the platforms because the hardware is different. Even on a DirectX PC, you can often have a lot of differences between the rendering scene for Nvidia, AMD and Integrated Intel gpus. Don't know exactly what issues Everspace had with the UE4, but…
Internal engines also on average are less cross platform. Simply because big publishers and shareholders don't want these very expenses that creep into development because of lock-in. That's why many Linux releases for such games use source or binary wrappers, rather than proper native rendering to begin with. This highlights my point above.