I think Vulkan is the way to go, yes its new, just keep in mind Vulkan is at v1.06 ALREADY so hopefully those shader problems will go away in short time.
Also I really don’t understand Apple and Metal, I don’t understand because is Apple outright BLOCKING Vulkan development on their platform? I never understood how they could do such a thing and keep a straight face about it, imagine if MS announced that they would BLOCK Vulkan from working on their platforms!
Anyway personally I think Vulkan is the future, more options, maybe you can have your game run through the browser under Apple OSX with a Vulkan browser tie in? I’m anti-apple so I can’t really comment much about it.
Personally I think you will sell more on future PS4 (XB1?) if you ported it that way, who the hell plays these types of games on Apple systems anyway? You can always ad in DX12 support later, Vulkan will let people not on Win10 to play the game with benefits (many ppl are not moving to Win10).
Yes but XB1 probably has a lock-down on DX12 only. (if they wanted to port in that direction in the future). I think at this point in time making a PS4 port is better due to larger audience.
Assuming Inovae wants to increase revenue in the future with ports, which is why he was talking about OSX being important, but really I don’t think they will make huge sales compared to say PS4 port which should support Vulkan at some point on top of their standard API?
I personally think Linux will start becoming more relevant over the next 12-24months.,
Been hearing that for years but Linux is still struggling in terms of users. Also consoles are not compatible and PC players will not be able to link up with friends on Playstation or XBox. Now if new technology allowed linkage then fine. Also the drive for more isn’t always better - when is enough enough? Not big on the Gordon Gekko approach - quality and consistency is key. Besides, there is lots of profit to be made with PC gaming: look how much Star Citizen is raking in and that’s not even including all the other exclusive PC developers who think it’s worth their while. So I am always weary of hearing about expanding to consoles at this stage, especially with limited manpower and resources.
Also recent changes with forced Windows 10 updates and windows pay wall store garden has put more focus on Linux. Valve is putting allow of effort in getting SteamOS and Steam Client under Linux working now. AMD has starting releasing betas of their new driver and appear to be taking Linux more serious then before. AMD is releasing Linux patches more frequent now also.
All this has only just started to happen for the last few months, not last several years. There is a huge push to get Linux up to stuff now, we also have Wayland advances coming.
Yes, and some games have been doing it already on PS4. PC / XB1 / PS4 can play together, MS Sony and PC allow it. MS only announced it recently thought.
Cool! Been playing PC games only so good to hear. But still concerned with looking to cross platform - but if it is coming into its own and doesn’t involve a lot of extra work, it is definitely something to seriously consider.
Iirc there has been cross platform play since the ps3 era with ffxiv (ps3-pc cross-platform … there was also some xbox pc cross platform that failed due to the game being a shooter … something shadowrun I think). Currently however certain people said they were interested in opening the platform in favor of cross platform play (namely some bigshot at Microsoft), including cross console platform play (since console-pc has already happened in the past and keeps happening). There are also people who are reserved (namely some bigshot at Sony). However, in the past, cross platform play failed due to Microsoft saying they wouldn’t do it, so that bigshot suddenly saying ‘would be great if we had that’ is a big deal.
@TerranAmbass Don’t forget Android. I have warthunder on my android shield tv and I can play with everyone too.
Only among enthusiasts. Don’t be fooled by the echo chamber. People have been talking about Linux reaching critical mass any day now since Windows 8 launched (or, depending on your social circle, since like 1992). It still hasn’t happened, and there’s really no reason to believe it will happen any time soon.
If anything, we’ve seen more people shift to Macs.
Really, though, we’ve just seen people shift to mobile. And as much as Android is Linux, it doesn’t count. Valve’s efforts will allow currently existing Linux gamers to drop Windows, but it isn’t going to lure many new people over. Linux really isn’t up to snuff for the consumer market. Most people who are even remotely tempted run away screaming pretty quickly.
You strike me as someone who doesn’t follow much Linux development but rather reads posts in forums from users who claim things. There have been ACTUAL Linux developments which suggest things will be changing VERY soon for Linux, AMD and NVIDIA are starting to become active with developing their drivers again, wayland additions have started to appear, open-source drivers are making mile stone changes.
Yes people have been claiming Linux will be the next best thing for a decade now, but you really just need to FOLLOW the development of certain things to know if that is true or not. Once AMD and NVIDIA’s new drivers mature things will be fantastic, and then there is Wayland coming along nicely, & even DX11 features under Wine showing up (Fallout4 under Linux would be nice).
Couple that with many AAA titles having decent Linux ports appearing, yep this isn’t some fake happening like all those guys post about in reddit for the past 10years. THINGS are actually really finally happening…
You’re half right. I don’t follow Linux development. I also don’t follow Mac OS development, nor Windows development. I just use computers, I know what using Linux is like, I know how most people want using their computers to be like, and those two roads aren’t anywhere near merging.
I’ve tried to convert to Linux multiple times over the last 15 years, and the answer continues to be NOPE!
And sales are…? Market share is doing…? Who are the people who are excited about these developments? You know, other than people who are already sold on the platform?
This is the reason I can’t agree with your assessment.
For the record, I have zero interest in Linux, except to (eventually) take the time to get my Raspberry Pi 2 up and running so that I can have a PLEX server at home.
You speak of DX11 features “showing up” (not fully implemented) into Linux. I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but D3D12 and Vulkan are the new big thing, and one (or both) of them will be getting used for PC development soon by virtually everybody, doubly so because of the better hardware usage. Linux is still implementing the “last” generation, but you expect it to become the market norm?
Market norm? no just saying you will see it take up more of the gaming market in the next 12-24 months, probably in the same lines of how much market Mac has atm. Vulkan will become the new norm for sure (has a few issues atm but nothing a bit of patching can’t fix, at 1.06 atm), which will allow easier multi-platform development. DX12 is XB1 and Windows10, NOTHING ELSE.
Yes…and this is the precise reason a great many developers will use it.
I doubt it, Mac has been trying to get a foothold in the gaming market forever and is still sitting around 5 13%(?) market share (I cannot find any number quoting gaming-specific market shares, but I assume it is significantly less given what Macs are marketed towards). Found a different site claiming 13% market share in terms of sales, but again: Macs are sold to yuppies, old people, and professionals, not gamers.
Mac is “simple” to use. Windows is “simple” to use. Linux is not.
Actually I would argue that Apple doesn’t care at all about gaming on Mac. They do care about it on iOS due to it being their largest source of revenue from the app store but aside from that I think Apple continues to be largely apathetic towards games on Macs due to their overpriced and woefully under powered hardware (excluding their displays, which are awesome).
I completely agree with this both as a regular desktop user and a developer. While I do believe things are changing for the better when it comes to games on Linux the platform is and continues to be a complete disaster. Realistically Linux has to be able to provide a good Desktop experience before it can truly become a viable games platform. I highly doubt this will change anytime soon unless some big company does a Google or an Apple and takes the kernel and builds their own OS in a way that doesn’t result in it just being another distro. Valve initially implied this was what they were going to do with SteamOS but in practice I haven’t been seeing much from them that gets me excited about SteamOS - quite the contrary in fact.
That being said building OS’s is hard so maybe it’s all in secret dev branches right now but I’m not holding my breath.
Uh… you do understand that DX11 not “working” on Linux is a licensing and proprietary issue, not any fault of Linux, right?
DX11 would work on Linux if it was compiled with similar dependencies on Linux, basically.
But who has the source and does the compiling of the distributions of DX11? Microsoft. Dur.
Just the same, Vulkan would work on XB1 I imagine. Its hardware should support it. It’s a licensing issue, and you can’t really blame them for that.
Not sure about that. The adoption rate for Win10, which is required for DX12, seems to be very poor.
Win10 adoption on steam got up to 30% very quickly, but has been around 1% per month since.
On the other hand, 80% of users have a Vulkan compatable GPU, and it looks like it’ll be many, many years before DX12 catches up to that while Vulkan will just get further ahead as there is still that 20% of the market to upgrade their GPU that’ll then be compatible regardless of OS.
And I’m seeing so many dozens and dozens of major developers adopting and moving forward with Vulkan instead, likely as a result.
Leaving out such a big market segment is a terrible, terrible business decision. You target that 80% of the market, not the 35% that you can only hope might be 50% in a year from now.
Either way, just leaving Linux out of it, Vulkan is the best thing you can use on any OS that supports DX11 since MS has stupidly limited DX12 to Win10. I use Win7 for my desktop.
Vulkan is nice for the long run in that Linux support is an option that becomes much easier to achieve (Another crowd funding afterward for Linux support is a good excuse for more fund raising)
It’s not like it has most of the drawbacks OpenGL has that would normally keep you with DX, outside that one that has been mentioned.
And it’s also not just a matter of waiting for Khronos Group to solve it. Valve, Epic, Id and others are solving it and will probably share ideas.
As an openSUSE and GNOME contributor, you are quite right. Linux desktop environment have improved a lot lately, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. This is caused by multiple factor, one of them being that desktop gui design is heavily patented. Thus, the gui projects have to think of alternatives that won’t infringe these pasterns, which take a very long time for the small devs team that works for these projects.
On the shader issue, I think that this will improve with time passing. When they will implement some code optimization, things will be a lot faster.
On the driver side, they are slowly maturing, nVidia already have a stable Vulkan Linux driver, AMD is working on their own Vulkan driver (AMDGPU Pro), and Intel is working on an open-source implementation for Mesa (there is a working pre-alpha version in the Mesa git repository). Here is a link for a recent Vulkan vs OpenGL (on Linux) : http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-nv-glvk&num=1