Curious - how come so many engines don’t support Mac? I am constantly baffled by how few games exist for my MacBook Pro.
Unreal and Unity do support Apple devices.
Plus, unlike Android, they actually provide tons of tooling for game development and graphics programming on iOS.
Google tells you to clone github repository from Vulkans shaderc.
They create a narrow space where it's possible to make money developing for their platform, but there's a huge risk that:
a) they will make a decision which makes your product no longer viable, or
b) they will decide to replicate your product as a 1st party offering and render you redundant (e.g. tile)
Adopting open standards like Vulkan would be the single best thing they could do to support games on their platform. Games are extremely high-investment, and having to develop against a second back-end like Metal is a perfect reason not to support a platform.
Apple's friendly to developers as long as they are willing to stay on the reservation, but there is no reward for doing so.
Want success with "developers friendly" tools? Try to make a business of using Khronos APIs in GNU/Linux games.
Ask Loki how well did it go.
As for Vulkan it is just the same design by committee extension spaghetti soup that killed OpenGL, just with even more boilerplate.
I don't buy that Vulkan is not a first-class choice for graphics. To the extent that it has issues, it's only because of (developer hostile) lack of support from major software vendors.
Now that Microsoft owns Doom, let's see how long it holds its Vulkan implementation.
> skohan: failing to support open standards is not developer friendly
> pjmlp: closed standards are developer friendly, because Vulkan is inadequate.
> skohan: Vulkan is provably adequate
> pjmlp: Microsoft will use its cash advantage to prevent the successful use of open standards, and is therefore developer friendly???
Foring me to get apple hardware by discouraging MacOS virtual machines is not friendly to developers.
Policing what apps people are even allowed to develop on some of their platforms (ie, no custom browser engines on ios) is not friendly to developers.
Deprecating support for opengl to push metal, a solution which is only available on their platform is not developer friendly.
Enjoy the developer friendliness of Steam on GNU/Linux.
Everyone above 40 managed to do it back when commercial tooling was the only option.
The best thing about GPL hate is that freebies devs will learn to finally start paying again for their tooling, just like in other professions.
Yeah, I don't know where the hell you get that!
Do they offer emulators for non-Mac developers to target their ecosystem?
Do they make even simple development onerous if you are on a Mac and do target their system, but have the audacity to want to share the app with someone else not in the same room with you?
You want to make a free app for your business targeting our ecosystem? Pay us bitch! Also, while we're at it, pay us every year from now on! Whoa! You also want to put it on our store, pay some more you fucking pay-pig!
> Plus, unlike Android, they actually provide tons of tooling for game development and graphics programming on iOS.
... read, we are so locked into and starved for hardware options that it is easy to release a few libraries that will work for your app ... for now! Has your business not changed at all and your app doesn't need any special privileges ... but it has been more than a few years .. haha! Go fuck yourself, sincerely Apple!
> Google tells you to clone github repository from Vulkans shaderc.
Apple makes you get into a personal relationship with them. I am not sure that is much better!
The lack of personal relationship with GNU/Linux offering is what made it fail the desktop adoption.
"Whataboutism" is the last gasp of a losing argument.
> The lack of personal relationship with GNU/Linux offering is what made it fail the desktop adoption.
This is just ridiculous.
Forcing you to buy specific hardware and banning virtualization to do builds is not friendly. Cloud builds is a huge pain. You essentially have to rent full macs from MacStadium.
Only Apple has the power to break this cycle by throwing money at game developers to reduce the financial risk (same way Epic does to get games into the Epic Game Store for instance).
It's insane to me that they're failing so badly at it: Apple's amazing at building brands, but gaming is huge with people under 30, and it might get harder to sell people a computer you can't run AAA games on.
Google could have eaten iPhone's lunch with gen Z with Stadia if they invested in it properly, but they didn't manage to make it work
They had really bad support for OpenGL and wanted developers to use Apple's Metal API. But developers stayed on DirectX (Windows-only) or OpenGL/Vulkan for Linux/Windows/Android crossplatform. It just wasn't economically viable to develop for Mac.
That said I can understand why there's not a lot of investment in mac, since Apple's shown to be very developer-hostile as far as games, and the market is pretty small outside of mobile games which are kind of a separate thing.
There's some potential with m-series processors - now there's basically one SOC to target for everything from an iPad to a desktop, so it's sort of like consoles where there's a very consistent hardware target to develop against.
Plus, unlike Android, they actually provide tons of tooling for game development and graphics programming on iOS.
Google tells you to clone github repository from Vulkan's shaderc.
Vulkan and OpenGL tooling on Android is a joke, to the point Unity are Unreal the official tools.
https://developer.android.com/games#develop-content
While Macs have all of this at their disposal,
https://developer.apple.com/wwdc21/sessions/?q=Metal
The only thing Android Games SDK has is a frame pacing API!?!