Quoting: TheRiddickI really don't quite understand some aspects of this, does this mean Chris Roberts and Star Citizen could pay only $1 for the entire use of the engine? lol

Large projects and developers almost invariably pay for support. Having the engine creators basically "in the team" actually often saves developers considerable sums of money due to less of their own expensive time spent stumbling on the quirks of the engine and more easily getting in fixes and tweaks instead of doing work-arounds in their game code. The only ones likely to pay trivial amounts are penniless indies, which is fine. This model enables both kinds of developers to make use of the engine.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I hope it's something more interesting than Doom. Mad Max would be fun.


And now to my happy place, Off Topic:

Quoting: omer666First, porting from one low level API to another low level API may range from difficult to suicidal, and then, it may ultimately bring some overhead whereas the goal of both these API's is to reduce this overhead to the minimum... nonsense if you ask me.

No, actually what you said is (partly) nonsense. Porting from an API to another is only difficult if these API's are very different. This isn't the case with Vulkan and DX12. Being low level hasn't got much to do with it. In fact, porting between them seems to be trivial compared to OpenGL and DX11 due to their very similar design. Parts of the port can almost be done with search-and-replace, especially if and when a usable HLSL to SPIR-V compiler finally surfaces. And porting itself does not imply overhead if the graphics engine is well designed and sensibly abstracted, although any backend implemented as an afterthought by a third party is rarely well optimized and polished.

I don't know the specifics about Metal, but it seems to do things a bit differently and porting might be quite a bit more work. More high level abstractions in some areas than the "competing" API's apparently. I don't see any reason to believe a port would be more difficult than let's say porting from DX11 to OpenGL though. In principle that is. I don't imagine there are that many graphics programmers very fluent in Metal at this point which naturally adds a hurdle to the process.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: slaapliedjeSo yeah, VR really is a new way to interact with software, and it is almost the ultimate way to do so.

Nah, that would be direct neural interfaces or whatever utopic/nightmarish (take your pick) sci-fi cliché we'll get in the future. Whatever lets us actually feel like we're moving about and interacting with the virtual environments without actually flailing about and bumping into stuff in the real world. Rolling our heads around wearing clumsy isolation helmets with screens glued to our eyeballs isn't quite there yet.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: WorMzyThe Gtk2 analogy works, but the Gtk3 one would only make sense if, every six months there was a new HTML5 standard, the old ones stopped working, and w3.org was the only website updated to use the new one. :P

It is a bit of a moving target, but it's nowhere near that bad. Theming-related stuff in particular has seen some breakage between releases, but it seems like they might be finally settling down. Hopefully. And in the end, there's tons of software out there using GTK+3 that works and looks just fine. Even Xfce is going through the transition finally, and so far lack of manpower seems to have been the only significant speed bump.

Qt is what I'd pick for commercial projects (for several practical reasons), but GTK is what I actually like using for some reason I can't quite put my finger on.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I don't think I've played any worms game since the first one. Apart from different weapons and stuff, this looks like more of the same. And for once that's not a bad thing. :) Why break something that works? Of course there's all kinds of newfangled on-line multiplayer stuff and the graphics are nicer, but that's irrelevant. Local multiplayer is where the fun is.

But I'll have to finally try hedgewars at some point, thanks for reminding me guys.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I tried coding while drunk once. It did not go well.

Anyway, the game looks great. Definitely going on my wishlist.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: aristoriasDo EULAs of modern games still allow such things?

That doesn't matter really. At least in the EU emulators and clean reimplementations of pretty much anything (except for certain crypto technologies I guess) are perfectly legal. No EULA can override law.

As long as OpenRW doesn't actually share anything that falls under Rockstar's copyright, it should be fine.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: BillNyeTheBlackGuyVR is the future, whether you like it or not.

So I hear, but what does that even mean? Please elaborate.

VR is clearly only useful for a subset of (real-time) 3D games and an even smaller subset of non-entertainment software. For other uses it's not the best tool for the job, now matter how cheap or lightweight the hardware becomes. Just like mobile touch-screen interfaces won't displace dedicated input devices and large screens for serious work, even if a persistent mob of hipsters have been declaring traditional computing extinct since the launch of the first iPad.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: slaapliedjeThis kind of reminds me of when 3Dfx cards were first coming out. 3D acceleration used to be laughed off as a niche, and that no one would support it, and initially there were so many different APIs for it, and you only hoped that you had ended up with a card that most games would support.

I don't remember anyone saying 3D acceleration was a niche, even if not everyone thought 3D games were their thing. It was all about making those pretty, textured 3D games run at acceptable speeds back when unaccelerated software implementations couldn't do much better than the pseudo-3D of Doom.

VR isn't about enhancement or acceleration, but about a different way to interact with and experience games (and software, the 3D painting stuff seems cool). And it's entirely about making games more immersive. I've found that people generally split into two camps on that issue. Personally I've never thought games need to be more immersive to be more enjoyable. Maybe it's a personality thing?

Quoting: BeamboomEver since I tried the first edition of the Rift there was no doubt for me: this is a vagon I'll jump on for sure.

Meh. I'll skip the wagons and wait until they come up with a comfortable and affordable rail service.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: cRaZy-bisCuiTGood to know! Still only Intel Iris Pro will benefit from this featues: Any OpenGL >=4.x will need a lot of performance.

Not quite. Some of the added API and extensions in OpenGL 4 are actually about optimization and lower level hardware access. These features do require compatible (modern) hardware, but not high-end stuff.

Of course it is true that newer API versions tend to be used in newer and more demanding software, and also coders who can properly optimize modern OpenGL code are few and far between, both factors contributing to the common misconception of new API being being more demanding than old.

View this comment - View article - View full comments