With news doing the rounds about the latest update to macOS, it turns out they're finally admitting they're doing nothing with their support of OpenGL and it's to be deprecated.
See here, where it says:
Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL
Apps built using OpenGL and OpenCL will continue to run in macOS 10.14, but these legacy technologies are deprecated in macOS 10.14. Games and graphics-intensive apps that use OpenGL should now adopt Metal. Similarly, apps that use OpenCL for computational tasks should now adopt Metal and Metal Performance Shaders.
I've seen so many complaints about the poor OpenGL support on macOS for quite some time, so it's not exactly a surprise. It's going to be a shock for those game developers not using a pre-made game engine like Unity and the likes.
"This isn't a Mac news website" I hear you scream at your monitor. Yeah, I know. However, this could have a big impact on Linux gaming, for better or worse. It could lead to developers either dropping Mac support due to the small market share and not being worth having to learn another (closed) API, or it could mean them dropping OpenGL in favour of Metal and not doing Linux version for the smaller again market share.
Interesting times we live in. Thankfully, the big game engines will take away some of the pain for developers. My Twitter feed has been—colourful this evening when news of this came in. Here's some initial reactions:
Jupiter Hell + DRL - D**m, the Roguelike developer:
Jupiter Hell is the last game that I'll do that will have OSX support. https://t.co/662OLJ0hqj
— Kornel Kisielewicz (@epyoncf) June 4, 2018
Defender's Quest developer:
If Apple thinks this is going to drive Metal adoption, they're nuts. All this means is "All aboard the Vulkan train!"https://t.co/szY0WuJ2Oz
— Lars Doucet (@larsiusprime) June 4, 2018
(Or just ignore Mac entirely, as Apple itself is doing more each day themselves)
MidBoss developer:
Fuck Apple. If they insist on going this route I may just have to start exclusively shipping Electron web builds of my games on Mac to ensure things will keep working. Sorry for those of you on Macs but 2% of my games users is not worth implementing a whole new back end for. https://t.co/lPoqpwOL9n
— 'Shark Hugs' Eniko (@Enichan) June 4, 2018
Starsector developer:
This would mean the end of OS X support by Starsector. Unless @LWJGL comes up with some dark magic? https://t.co/2RaKk0Q5fw
— Alexander Mosolov (@amosolov) June 4, 2018
Maia developer:
I won't port thousands of lines of my engine to a non standard proprietary API. Neither will many other developers either on principle or due to OSX's tiny install base. Here lies the end of games on Apple's desktop platform. pic.twitter.com/nKUWiMKwDS
— Simon Roth (@SimoRoth) June 4, 2018
The list goes on and on like that. What will be interesting to see, is if more developers who are building the tools themselves look to projects like MoltenVK to use Vulkan on both Linux and Mac.
I do have to wonder, if Valve knew this was coming and helped get MoltenVK open sourced to help for when this situation eventually came.
What are your thoughts?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Mountain Man Jun 5, 2018
Quoting: EhvisA lot (if not most) professional software still uses OpenGL (older compatibility stuff even). Seems like a harsh move to kill that off. I'm sure Laminar Research of X-Plane won't be amused either.Laminar are big Mac guys -- it's their development platform -- and have been planning to support Metal for a long time, at least since 2015, that is if they haven't added support already. I haven't really kept up with X-Plane news.
ElectricPrism Jun 5, 2018
Well I imagine that the 32.9% of developers that already use Linux will go up.
macOS is 18.4% and iOS is 16.4% -- I expect fluctuation there in the 2018 survey.
I expect this to push OpenGL apps to Vulkan.
I also expect this with the GitHub news to make the platform lock-in more dire which will boost Linux development, market-share, and interest from the big guys -- Gabe Newell, and other big developers.
Edit:
Relistening to his live stream: the mac and linux version are only there because it is so fucking easy.
https://gaming.youtube.com/watch?v=xtiJKuYnaD8&feature=share&t=4767
Yes, the developer is live debugging and testing his game. FortressCraft evolved is awesome.
Last edited by Ardje on 5 June 2018 at 8:38 am UTC
Quoting: ArdjeI've heard a developer say that the only reason he also has mac as a platform is because it is so easy to generate the mac version. As for money it wasn't worth any hassle. Now I don't know what he said about the linux version, as I was playing edeejay at the same time.
I think this could be seriously problematic. This affects indie devs not using one of the big engines, that include Linux targets. If it is not possible anymore to at least more or less cover Mac+Linux with the same effort, than the little Linux alone market share won't cut it for many devs, I'm afraid.
Quoting: [email protected]They did say 'legacy apps' will run though. So they are likely going to ship some version of OpenGL.
They said they will run for the coming version. In that version it will be deprecated, which means they intend to remove it for the next one.
Quoting: Mountain ManLaminar are big Mac guys -- it's their development platform -- and have been planning to support Metal for a long time, at least since 2015, that is if they haven't added support already. I haven't really kept up with X-Plane news.
Planning yes, but reading between the lines they're nowhere near ready yet. I suppose this does give them a deadline to develop it before the next major macos release. Still, the rendering engine is mostly one guy with more to do than just working on Vulkan/Metal. No so sure they can make it stable before that time.
https://twitter.com/Krita_Painting/status/1003932780235980800
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