OMG, down to only 440 FPS?! How could that massive performance loss possibly be worth it?!1!?11?!!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThat would be the rub, though (well, one of them). Once all your customers are stuck on one platform and you're dependent on the tools made by the vendor of that platform, they can take as much of your profits as they want, because you have no other choices. It's the vendor's tools or you're not selling anything.
Why do people think companies struggle so hard to gain monopolies? Why do people think laws got passed against monopolies in the first place?

the issue is, is not an monopoly.
its sony (ps4) vs nintendo (switch) vs microsoft (xbox and windows with play anywhere) vs valve and others on pc.

game makers have no reason to support linux, if it where: one side linux, other side microsoft monopoly, sure, some of then would chose to support either linux or both linux and windows.
but that is not the case, they arent afraid of ms monopoly that aint gonna happen.

sure support windows/mac/linux is cool, that is a reason to use vulkan.
but xbox right now is more profitable than mac and linux.

android could be a savior for us, but the types of games that are made for android are very different from the ones made for pc/console.

Final fantasy 15 tried to make an dumbed down version for mobile (ff15 pocket edition) i'm not sure if it sold well, but it has completely different assets.

now with the remake of secret of mana, they made graphics that could be ported to mobile easily (instead of dumb down the graphics).

other than that examples, i dont see companies having more incentive to use vulkan than to use DX12.
if they can afford they will use both to see where they get better results.

game engines on the other hand, have clients that make games for mobile and clients that make games for pc or console, they have an good reason to use vulkan (or both but giving priority to vulkan)

Your comment isn't really relevant to what I was saying. I was commenting on the idea that many studios would be happy to be locked to a single platform, and making a general point about the implications of such locking. In the abstract, like. It wasn't about the specifics of what platforms what is on right now.

But, talking of such specifics, your comment also misses a huge factor. It may become accurate in the future, but right now there is another huge platform that DX12 does not cover and Vulkan does: Windows < 10. Mostly Win7 I guess. There's still a LOT of that out there, and there will be for a couple-three years yet. So unless you're expecting your game to have a pretty dang robust "long tail", the "Not yet on Windows 10" market looms large, and you lose it if you go DX12.

UWP isnt compatible with Vulkan nor any program with opengl above 1.0
that means that vulkan apps cant run on xbox, hololens and whatever else microsoft put on the market.

currently lose the xbox market would do more harm to the pockets of the developers than losing mac/linux.

Did you in fact read what I said before you replied to it?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: leo523Valve spoked about that!! They not stop to help Linux.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1696043806550421224/ [External Link]

That's interesting.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

So is tacking possible?
. . . I want to make the boat from Waterworld. Really dumb movie, but such a cool boat.
View video on youtube.com

View this comment - View article - View full comments

There does seem to be, for the really big companies, this odd piece of territory where in terms of sheer dollars, what we all assume business decisions are supposed to be based on, it would technically be a plus to release on Linux, and yet they don't. Some people think this means the (Microsoft) fix is in.
I'm starting to suspect it's just that companies aren't as economically rational as our dominant theories make it seem like they ought to be. Big corporations are there to make money, yes--but they are also these big steep hierarchies with decision-making done by a small number of people who are a long way from where anything real happens. That small number of people can only pay attention to so much, and while money is very important to them staying firmly in control can be even more important. So if you have something like, "Should we release on an additional platform?" (or do anything else new) the question is not so much, "Will it make money?" as "Will it make so much money that it will be worth having some of us top executives use the time and attention it will take to keep the process under our control?"
Which is to say, really big companies are built to leave a certain amount of money on the table if it's in amounts too small for their big bosses to spend attention on. One of the reasons new companies come up to challenge old ones is that these neglected table scraps sometimes turn out to be stuff that will grow big once nurtured. It is unfortunate for Linux that it may be falling into this "Yes, profitable, but not enough to spend the time thinking about" gap.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: NolentharYou then assume than people never needs one specific software (which might exist on Linux but not be on the "store") because when they do, they might have to discover themselves that there are other ways to install apps ;)

Yup. That's exactly what I assume. Most nontechnical users don't need a lot of highly specialized software, and the repos have a ton of stuff. My wife is using a frigging Chromebook and she's never felt the lack of software. "Everything available in the Ubuntu/Mint repository" handles a much wider set of use-cases.

Quoting: NolentharI'd agree that it's probably doable for a random Jane or Joe to use Linux nowadays and do pretty much everything, but it still requires a strong will and a willingness to gimp (no pun intended) your experience for the sake of your principles. It's no small feat to do that.

It's a small feat. It remains true that something like Mint lacks a smidge of polish compared to MacOS or Windows. There's no way around it: There is currently no company investing serious deep-pockets money into doing the ongoing QA to make a Linux version with all rough edges smooth. Nor is there likely to be in future--there's no money in it. But the overall user experience is nonetheless probably better than Windows. The Microsoft folks build in enough deliberate design flaws from a UI perspective (in their attempts to reach other goals) that they end up spoiling the user experience more IMO than any remaining polish issues on something like Mint, which are generally pretty small. So for instance you end up with all the annoying/creepy update stuff. Or the actual design of the UI sacrificing usability for branding in one way or another.

MacOS probably has a better, if less flexible, UI than Linux. So they say, anyhow--I actually find it a bit frustrating when I try but I'm sure I'd be OK once I got used to its way of doing things. But you gotta pay through nose for your hardware.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: NolentharYet, Linux in itself stagnates, incapable to break from a few % of user (1% among gamer I believe ? 2 maybe ? 3 at most ?). Why is that ? Simply because if there is one thing Linux is bad at, it's simplifying things for users. Step back from your expert Linux user shoe, and go back a moment. You need to pick a distribution, among thousands, all doing something a bit different and offering a different way to install stuff, yum, apt, dpkg, pkm (...). And even when things are nearly simplifed to what they are on "mainstream" OS (aka, one click to download), you may have to choose between Debian or Fedora, and some apps won't even offer you the possibility, forcing you to recompile the package to what your distribution will accept.

No. Methinks you need to step back from your "expert Linux user shoe". A new nontechnical Linux user isn't going to choose between thousands of distros. If they have a friend who uses it they will use whatever that friend recommends/installs for them. If they buy preloaded, they will use Ubuntu. If they're the comparison shopping type and check what's popular and user-friendly, they will end up with Ubuntu or Mint. Currently all other distros are either business or technical oriented or niche.
Once it's installed they will either find the software installer or they will give up. If they find the software installer they will use it and I see no reason for it to ever occur to them that there is any other way (except Steam) to install software on Linux. They will never hear the words yum, apt or et cetera unless they decide they really want to get to know their computer better.
Seriously. I use Linux ultimately for political reasons, and so I suffered through mucking around with dependency hell back in the day and learned a very few things about how Linux/es work. But I'm not a technical user and I'm not a tinkerer, so it's with great pleasure that I say I haven't touched any of that stuff in years. If it's not in the repository I don't wanna know about it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: KnucksThe idea never took off because the steam machine prices was ridiculous for a decent machine. When the established consoles was cheaper than the steam machines, it was doomed to fail. Still hoping Valve are secretly making there own machine using all AMD components.

Not the only reason, by far. There was a lack of polish and features (multimedia stuff etc) compared to other consoles. There was not nearly enough marketing push. With the state of drivers and dependence on OpenGL, games tended to be slower.
The price, polish & features, and marketing are under Valve's control if it makes its own. The graphics issues are improving at good speed but are still the big question mark frankly--and it's not just graphics drivers and Vulkan. What's the situation with Wayland?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Bottom line to me: Model A can be a better model, model B can be a worse model, but people using model B can still get good results sometimes and people using model A can screw it up or have insufficient resources. Open is certainly a better model for bug tracking. Employees of a company using a worse model may still be competent, committed people doing their best and manage to extract some good results.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GustyGhostStrategic closedness. Unreal Engine are doing the same, I believe.

Maybe Godot will eat their lunch if they're not careful.

Looking at how things have worked out in much of the software world, it's distinctly possible whether they're careful or not. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but in a few years. There are a whole pile of areas where anything platformy has tended to go open source over time. We happen to be operating in the one glaring exception (the desktop operating system), but as a general tendency the pull seems to be strong.

View this comment - View article - View full comments