Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: sr_ls_boyThis suggest the answer is no. Nivida owns the patent.

https://www.google.com/patents/US5651104


Another patent own by Intel lapsed in December.

https://www.google.com/patents/US6816167

How is it the newer patent expired before the older one?

I guess someone forgot to do clever redrafting/extension tricks.

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Quoting: etonbearsThis is quite nice, but possibly more important is the Vulkan Portability Initiative

The aim here is to identify the subset of Vulkan that can map directly to D3D12 and Metal, provide open-source libraries to effect the mapping and cross-compilers for spir-v to the D3D12/Metal intermediate shader languages.

That would possibly offer developers a single API ( Vulkan ) to target almost every platform at minimal performance cost.

The question would then be whether that is good enough for the main AAA developers ( it certainly would be for smaller teams ), and whether the parties that control D3D12 and Metal attempt to sabotage the initiative...

That does sound interesting. I wish it well.

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Quoting: Spud13yI can't justify giving Tim Schafer money. He, or at least his company, can't seem to know how to manage large sums of money and their recent projects (other than Linux ports) come out to be pretty horrendous.

That seems like a strange reason to take a principled ( "justify" ) stand against giving someone money. I mean, mismanaging money isn't an ethical failure, and the fact that someone makes products X, Y and Z which are lousy seems irrelevant to whether you should give them money for product A which is good. In a world where we all hand out money for products whose company CEOs and major shareholders are actively evil, this just seems a weirdly pointless cavil.

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Well, vive la (oddly commercialized) revolution!!!
It looks like fun and I love the French guy urging you to rise up, overthrow evil (and buy his upgrades).
Only on my wishlist until I can just install it and go, though.

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QuoteThey say they have no plans for Vulkan right now

Of course, one of the beauties of open source is that someone could step in and contribute at any time.

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Quoting: minidouThey used to be supporters of DX12 but admitted they switch their focus on Vulkan earlier this year, so they might already have been working with crytek or have their own work for Vulkan.

Every time I am reminded of it, I think that Microsoft's decision to make DX12 work on Windows 10+ only was too clever by half and may actually result in Vulkan becoming the more dominant platform. They underestimated Vulkan because they've been able to pwn OpenGL all this time. So they just took DX dominance as a given, and decided to use DX12 to try to pull their user base to the newest versions of Windows. Only problem: Vulkan is at least as good as DX12, has moved pretty fast, and so is becoming viable while older versions of Windows are still a really big slice of the market. So, for all non-console games, Vulkan over DX12 is a no-brainer, and even for stuff that's going on XBox, you probably want both rather than just DX12 (since they're similar enough that it's apparently fairly easy).
Linux could reap the benefit of Microsoft's serious tactical mistake in its battle with Win 10+'s current major competitor, older versions of Windows.

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Quoting: Tiedemann

Quoting: melkemindIt doesn't seem like they're asking for much money. Am I just overestimating how much it takes to make a game, or does S$70,000 get you a lot more in Malaysia?

From the "Why Kickstarter" part of the page, it seems a lot have been done already:

I was thinking the trailer seemed pretty dashed slick for something that supposedly didn't exist yet.

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That seems positive. And while CRYENGINE may be less of a force than it was, it's still well enough known that the pros will notice. One would expect other engine makers to be all "Well if even CRYENGINE can do it we'd look lame if we didn't".
So this is one step on the way to Vulkan being a keep-up-with-the-Joneses, must-have checkbox. That's a Good Thing.

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First game in a while where my first reaction to the trailer is "That's so cute!"

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Quoting: elmapul" don't think it matters that much if a ton of people actually run SteamOS as their distro. It's the way it influences distro design, and reassures developers, that is important."
it will not influence the design if no one use it, even game developers will not target it, and steam runtime is proprietary.
are you really saying that the solution for the linux fragmentation is: ship proprietary code?

So, first, even if you say SteamOS "will not" have influence and game developers "will not" target it if no one uses it, this isn't a hypothetical. SteamOS exists now and isn't being used much directly now. So does it have influence, do game developers target it? I think fairly clearly it does and they do.
Second, the Steam runtime? Don't believe I even mentioned it. Forget apples and oranges, and forget comparing--I'm talking about an apple and you're trying to refute me by pretending it's a hammer.

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