Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Yes they do, just indies and FOSS devs on HN don't.

The software development culture on the games industry is to make use of the best way to squeeze the graphics performance of a given piece of hardware until the last drop of juice.

This is an industry that was born from rewriting their whole games for each type of gaming platform they wanted to sell games to, in Assembly. In many cases using a dumb hexdump editor connected over a serial cable.

Having an abstraction layer over all graphics API is a minor inconvenience that can be easily done in one month.

Plus it is something that is only written once for a specific engine.

View on HN

No, they don't. Because it's not free and wastes their time. You just keep repeating this weird idea, that developers like this balkanized landscape. They don't. No one likes it, except for lock-in freaks who created it to keep cross platform development expensive.

> Having an abstraction layer over all graphics API is a minor inconvenience that can be easily done in one month.

Quite false. Take a look how long it takes major engines (like Unreal) to implement such abstraction. And how long it takes them to iron out bugs caused by underlying differences. And then try to claim it's a good thing they need to waste all this time. I don't really understand why you personally like this mess.

Because I have the experience in the games industry that you lack.

Apparently from the votes I sometimes get, others also share my life experience.

If you have experience, you'd know it's time consuming and taxing. You either like this time wasting, or you benefit from this taxation (working for MS?).

Only FOSS devs see it as time consuming and taxing, professional game studios see it as an opportunity to explore hardware performance to the last drop.

For anyone with experience in graphics programming, the time to triangle is just like doing hello world or playing fizz buzz.

The last time I set my feet inside of a game studio was more than a decade ago, but it started with an S not M, and I still have contacts in the industry.

> Only FOSS devs see it as time consuming and taxing

You don't need to see it, it's a simple fact. Engines like Unreal, Cry/Lumberyard, Unity and etc. aren't FOSS. Plus they are commercial products. Ask their developers if current balkanized mess helps them delivering features for game developers faster. The answer is no, it takes them much longer.

So please stop claiming that it's not a problem. It only shows that you aren't sincere.

The reality is, in house tooling and engines do use multiple graphics api's, and that's perfectly fine. They are not slapdash implementations; professional graphics rendering programmers know and use these API's (See the GPU Pro book series, and Real Time Rendering), it's their profession.

A commercially successful multi-platform game like skyrim, use at least 4 API's (DirectX, NVN, PSGL, and DirectX), but no OpenGL or Vulkan to be seen at all.

Anvil and Frostbite have no existing opengl driven software titles. And that's perfectly fine.

And using those 4 APIs isn't free, don't you think? It means a lot of resources are spent on supporting them, instead of fixing actual bugs or developing better features. I.e. they pay the tax. This applies to in-house or third party engines all the same. And it's not perfectly fine by far.

I agree it's not free. But will you make return on the effort/time/money invested?

EDIT: Do you think debugging vulan/opengl is free? Software houses like valve have had to make their own tooling to debug and optimise for vulkan and opengl.

It's not about some effort. It's about wasteful multiplication of that effort, caused by balkanized API landscape.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com