Timeline for Why are games built on cross-platform engines sometimes exclusive to Windows?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
19 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 15, 2017 at 12:07 | comment | added | Suici Doga | phone gpus are much less powerful than even intel graphics since they have thermal and size limits. also many people have phones which do not support opengl es 3.0 so only few people will be able to use your app unless you rewrite your game for primitive opengl es 2.0 | |
| Jul 14, 2017 at 15:05 | comment | added | Lightness Races in Orbit | @marsh: Full 3D, textures, large environment.. the fundamentals are all there are work seamlessly. If you dropped to 0.5FPS on modern phone h/w then something is very wrong or you are attempting photorealism to a degree that would stretch even a gaming PC. | |
| Jul 14, 2017 at 14:49 | comment | added | marsh | @LightnessRacesinOrbit Maybe he wants to run a game that is not 15 years old. | |
| Jul 14, 2017 at 9:31 | comment | added | jobukkit | @Luaan "Since most PC GPUs at the time only implemented a small subset of OpenGL in hardware, Microsoft wrote a full software OpenGL implementation and then offered it to GPU companies, so those companies could just replace the parts that their GPU implemented in hardware and still have a full OpenGL driver. Once they had all spent a good deal of time doing this, Microsoft actually refused to license any of their OpenGL code for release, effectively guaranteeing that smaller GPU companies would only have support for DirectX." | |
| Jul 14, 2017 at 5:54 | comment | added | Luaan | @JopV. When was this gap when "GPU manufacturers needed to be bribed not to support OpenGL"? OpenGL simply wasn't relevant for consumers back then. And it's not like SGI was being altruistic when they made it "open" (or when they crushed the previous open standard pushed by big players like IBM). And again, DirectX is more than OpenGL. Many OpenGL games on Windows still use DirectX (e.g. for sound). And finally, I stopped game development ten years ago. OpenGL was at its worst, and Vulkan didn't exist :) My last (cross-platform) attempt was in OpenGL, and it was a waste of effort. | |
| Jul 13, 2017 at 19:26 | comment | added | jobukkit | @Luaan Actually that's not true, Microsoft forced DirectX on people in the beginning, for example by bribing GPU manufacturers not to support OpenGL, they only ended these tactics after DirectX became popular so they weren't necessary anymore. And OpenGL was not used for games in the beginning because it's older. I just wanted to respond to your allegation that cross-platform 3D development sucks because of API fragmentation, that doesn't actually exist anymore because there has been no reason not to use OpenGL/Vulkan (even for a game planned to be Windows-exclusive) for a very long time. | |
| Jul 13, 2017 at 17:58 | comment | added | Luaan | @JopV. Umm, no. The history is a tiny bit more complicated than that. But there's really no point in discussing this here. I'll just note that OpenGL is a 3D rendering API; DirectX is a lot broader than that. If you need to engage in pointless debate, at least compare OpenGL to Direct3D :) OpenGL was designed for professional 3D work ("opening" the proprietary IrisGL). What other platform supported OpenGL at that time? There was no "hampering cross-platform development" - Windows had native OpenGL support. OpenGL just never was intended for anything but high-end professional work. | |
| Jul 13, 2017 at 13:39 | comment | added | jobukkit | @Luaan Thing is, DirectX was solely created as a trick to lock developers into Windows and hamper cross-platform development. There is no reason to use DirectX for anything (other than nativity) since OpenGL and Vulkan work on Windows (and tend to perform better than DirectX). | |
| Jul 12, 2017 at 15:41 | comment | added | Cody | For the record, the 0.5 fps was when the game was at alpha, tested on an older device, and most of the code was not optimized. It just served as a good example of the massive performance differences between desktop computers vs other devices since the desktop build at the time was running about 30 fps. I honestly have no idea how well it would perform now, but definitely not the 50 fps the game currently gets on Windows. | |
| Jul 12, 2017 at 13:08 | comment | added | Luaan | @LightnessRacesinOrbit Believe it or not, I've seen worse, boiling down to a single seemingly innocuous check somewhere in the OpenGL port... that was one of the things that made me stop attempts at serious game development, or at least anything multi-platform (it's still fun to make things that work on my computer :P). I assume primarily OpenGL-programmers (or 3Dfx, or Vulcan, or...) have similar anecdotes when trying to port their code to DirectX. Well, if they ever tried that, of course. 3D development is getting better, but it still has plenty of hair-pulling horribleness. | |
| Jul 12, 2017 at 10:23 | comment | added | Lightness Races in Orbit | @JopV.: Fine, 25, 30, whatever. Although, you don't need to sync input with video so interactivity with under 30 FPS is certainly possible (it just won't look very good) | |
| Jul 12, 2017 at 10:17 | comment | added | jobukkit | @LightnessRacesinOrbit 30 FPS is the minimum for anything interactive. Below that you can't sync input with video anymore. | |
| Jul 12, 2017 at 9:33 | comment | added | Lightness Races in Orbit | @Luaan: Understood but 0.5 frames per second in something that is (presumably) expected to do more like 25+ is pretty extreme inefficiency! | |
| Jul 12, 2017 at 8:50 | comment | added | Luaan | @LightnessRacesinOrbit Well, it isn't a question of raw power, really. It's just that some things happen to be a lot more expensive on some platforms than other. Even today, there's massive differences between otherwise comparable AMD and Intel CPUs on certain specific workloads - GPUs are even worse. Even the "GPU SDK's" have massive differences in unexpected places :D Even different OS on the same PC can have significant differences - e.g. poor drivers, or even just things that are inherently slower (e.g threads/processes on Linux vs. Windows - both approaches have their pros and cons). | |
| Jul 11, 2017 at 15:39 | comment | added | Cody | @LightnessRacesinOrbit well, it is Unity... Really though, we have one particular effect that is central to the game, and really inefficient. The guy who wrote it is gone and we haven't been able to find a way to make it better. Such is life... | |
| Jul 11, 2017 at 10:31 | comment | added | Lightness Races in Orbit | Anyway this answer is more about porting games to different hardware platforms/paradigms, and less about OSs on a PC | |
| Jul 11, 2017 at 10:31 | comment | added | Lightness Races in Orbit | My phone can play GTA Vice City with no trouble. Sounds like your rendering engine is inefficient! :) | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 20:35 | review | First posts | |||
| Jul 10, 2017 at 22:21 | |||||
| Jul 10, 2017 at 20:30 | history | answered | Cody | CC BY-SA 3.0 |