“Apple’s move to cut OpenGL after macOS 10.14 Mojave and pushing for the use of its own Metal graphics technology has come under fire from developers, expressing concerns it will impact cross-platform game development, and even causing some to declare they won’t produce games for the Mac in the future,” Malcolm Owen reports for AppleInsider.
“While the support for OpenGL is still available, it is unknown when Apple will remove it from macOS completely, but it is not entirely unexpected,” Owen reports. “OpenGL on macOS High Sierra uses version 3.3 that was released in 2010, rather than using the more up-to-date version 4.6 released in 2017.”
“Bridge Builder and Ponifex developer Alex Austin suggested the change will cause more work when attempting to port games to the Mac… ‘I’m not going to spend any time on Metal because Macs are a pretty small percentage of the market, and really probably not worth it even now,’ suggests Austin. ‘I just do it because I try to support fans if I can,'” Owen reports. “Thomas Altenburger of Flying Oak Games was more direct on Twitter, advising ‘I’m sorry Mac users, but this means we will stop publishing games on Mac if it ever stop(s) shipping with the OS.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Adios, half-assed porters.
SEE ALSO:
Apple deprecates OpenGL across all OSes; urges developers to use Metal – June 5, 2018
Apple positions Metal as part of new 3D graphics standard for Web – February 8, 2017
Apple’s Metal and how it can impact Mac gaming – September 30, 2016
Apple’s number one CAD vendor is very excited about Metal for Mac – June 11, 2015
Metal for Mac is so huge, bye-bye Mac Pro – June 9, 2015<
Since Metal is based on OpenGL anyway, and Vulkan is essentially based on Metal… what the hell is their problem? They’re lazy. A metal cross compiler is built into Xcode for fuck sake… lazy. And I doubt any major publisher would do this, nor anyone who develops iOS games. Now since its easier to make a cross platform iOS – macOS application, Metal support would already be baked in. And then you could just run the Mac in Windows to play games if you really need that. But if you’re just playing video games you’re buying a Mac anyway, you’re custom building some “super machines” because you’re sooooo much more important than everything else (oh wait you’re not). Good riddance.
MDN take is spot on again.
No, MDN offers no rationale for their snide take.
There’s no good reason for Apple to refuse to support a current standard (OpenGL 4.6) that is perfectly adequate for many software titles and just as efficient as Metal. It’s not like Metal does anything that OpenGL cannot. Why are you cheering for Apple to turn its back on open source standards and go proprietary?
What are you going to say when Apple loses its interest and lets its progress lag, and then you wake up and realize that Vulcan is miles ahead of Apple’s APIs?
Apple having dropped the ball on this crucial market ( high end gaming ) and pretty much abandoning gamers …leaving them no choice but to flock to windows … has to do anything it can to encourage porting of games not dig holes in the path…..
Apple!… kids/teens/gamers avoid Mac becouse of its gaming limitations/ shortcomings ..are u aware of that?
Sigh…
Facilitate! Dont impede porting… you are not in a postion to be dictatorial in a market where u are no force at all .. yet you need to be.
Your ego, i guess, stops you from learning from the mistakes of your past….AI at top of the list: from Spell check ( yes spell check, its dismal dumbness is very concerning and telling of the underlaying foundation there .. ) , to contextual understanding , to search, to Dumb as F Siri ( relative to competition), To all AI discipline…… to Pros/Power users ….. Schools!………….Add on top your dictatorial ways as to how i should manage my assests and files and where and how i can orgnize them (ios f-up) …….and now this…
Is it ego or is it ignorance…. perplexing!
Apple: the screen or the hammer ..? ! ?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=axSnW-ygU5g
How many Windows games are still using OpenGL? Isn’t everything using DirectX?
That was my impression I was reading a couple years ago how OpenGL was not the prime mover in PC Games anyway. One does presume that with iOS featuring in Macs from next year (most like) that there may be an opportunity for iOS games to expend their potential if they are compatible with that particular development. In that case as Macs have never been the lead game platform (since the 80s anyway) that might be the far better route for Apple rather than being a second class PC game platform for ever more.
Can’t they just include OpenGL in their games as a library? Or ask users to get it from Homebrew, if its there? As well, as long as PPSSPP still works on Mac, I’m good.
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OpenGL is the standard for a LOT of scientific computing. The question is: are Scientists the next big group left in the cold by Apple?
When anyone leaves snarling comments then you know it‘s to cover the fact that they have no argument. So MDN’s take is really poor.
However most real scientific computing is done on a cluster of some kind. no mac in existence can handle the sheer size of data sets being crunched by your average scientific research team. think 1000’s of cores, and terabytes of ram.
sure they might have a mac on their desk but its just a fancy dumb terminal for something else.
for some things, yes. But if you’re just visualising some data, or crunching a small dataset then a standard Mac will do the job. Laptops are so powerful now for things like bioinformatics that they’re perfectly adequate for many researchers’ jobs.
I suspect many of them will go to Linux, or keep using OpenGL as it’s maintained by third parties (lije XQuartz).
Open GL is what is needed to run a lot of 3D CAD packages on the Mac & in Boot Camp.
Don’t deprecate it !!!
Again, OpenGL will still work, and Metal is based on OpenGL. It seems that Apple doesn’t want to adopt Vulkan, since Metal is better and more efficient and what Vulkan is attempting to be. And if you’re worried about CAD, autodesk is clearly on board already so that’s not an issue. And they make iOS apps currently which means they’re already working in Metal. This doesn’t effect scientific computing because mathematica and other major apps already support Metal acceleration in macOS. This really only effects game developers and cross platform PC games that have been ported over the years, poorly. As snarky as MDN is being here, they’re correct.