101–107 of 107 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But sdl is super high level. If you want to do more than pong, you'll hit a wall very quickly. I just want OpenGL, it was the perfect level of abstraction. I still use it today, both at work and for personal projects.
OpenGL is designed-by-committee state-machine crap. You don't know it yet, but what you really want is DirectX 9/10/11.
My opinions of Vulkan have not changed significantly since this was posted a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601605 I'm sure Vulkan is fun and wonderful for people who really want low level control of the graphic stack, but I found it completely miserable to use. I still haven't really found a graphics API that works at the level I want that I enjoyed using; I would like to get more into graphics prog…
To this day, the best 3D API I’ve used (and I’ve tried quite a few over the years) is Apple’s SceneKit. Just the right levels of abstraction needed to get things on the screen in a productive, performant manner for most common use cases, from data visualization to games, with no cruft. Sadly 1) Apple only, 2) soft deprecated.
In general, it suffered from the problem of even Apple not knowing what it was made for, and what it even is. For a 3D API, it has less features than OpenGL 2. For a game engine, it… also has way less features than the competition, which shouldn’t surprise anyone - game engines are hard, and the market leaders have been developed for _decades_. But that’s what it looks like the most - a game engine. (It even has physics.)
Customizing the rendering pipeline in SceneKit is absolutely horrible. The user is given a choice between two equally bad options: either adding SCNTechniques which are configurable through .plists and provide no feedback on what goes wrong with their configuration (as like 3D rendering isn’t hard enough already), or using “shader modifiers” - placing chunks of Metal code into one of 4 places of the SceneKit’s default shader which the end users _don’t even have the source code of_ without hacking into the debug build! Or pulling it from Github from people who already did that [_].
If you just need something that can display 3d data, SceneKit is still fine, but once there’s a requirement to make that look good, it’s better to throw everything away and hook up Unity instead.
[_] https://gist.github.com/warrenm/794e459e429daa8c75b5f17c0006...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The WebGPU spec identifies squarely as a web standard: "WebGPU is an API that exposes the capabilities of GPU hardware for the Web." There are also no mentions of non-web applications. The It's true that you can use Dawn and wgpu from native code but that's all outside the spec.
There is mention of desktop applications in their getting-started docs; it seems well within the intention of the maintainers to me. https://eliemichel.github.io/LearnWebGPU/introduction.html > Yeah, why in the world would I use a web API to develop a desktop application? > Glad you asked, the short answer is: Reasonable level of abstraction Good performance Cross-platform Standard enough Future-proof
I just want to be a bit picky and say that bike shedding means focusing on trivial matters while ignoring or being oblivious to the complicated parts. What he described sounded more like a combination of feature creep/over-engineering.
I just want to be a bit picky and say that bike shedding means focusing on trivial matters while ignoring or being oblivious to the complicated parts. What he described sounded more like a combination of feature creep/over-engineering.
The author could also have used the phrase "hobby horsing", which is similar to bike shedding in that the individual is focusing on things that don't really push the project forward, but which rather give them personal pleasure, instead. Bike shedding usually is explained as "working out what color to paint the bike shed before the rest of the house is done".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SDL 3.0 introduced their GPU API a year or so ago, which is an abstraction layer on top of vulkan/others, might want to check it out. Although after writing an entire engine with it, I ended up wanting more control, more perf, and to not be limited by the lowest common denominator limits of the various backends, and just ended up switching back to a Vulkan-based engine. However, I took a lot of learnings from the SDL…
But sdl is super high level. If you want to do more than pong, you'll hit a wall very quickly. I just want OpenGL, it was the perfect level of abstraction. I still use it today, both at work and for personal projects.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenGL is still being maintained, it just isn't being updated. Since OpenGL 4.0 or something we've had vertex and pixel shaders. As a non-AAA developer, I can't imagine anything else I'd really need. BTW: If anyone says OpenGL is "deprecated", laugh in their face.
Apple officially deprecated GL/GLES on both MacOS and iOS 7 years ago, and only ever supported up to GL 4.1 (which came out in 2010), meaning it doesn't support essential "modern" features like compute shaders (DX11 had them in 2009), or bindless textures (supported since 2012 on AMD+Nvidia, and 2015 for Intel iGPUs, massive performance win, needed for GPU driven rendering and ray tracing).