Garage Games & OpenGL

#1 Matt addressed OpenGL for TGEA and beyond in his recent blog post. (See his comment towards the bottom of the comments section.

#2 It does seem implied that OpenGL/Mac support will happen at some point, which is very good news. I'm content just knowing GG's attitude is to do it at some point. I had about written it off.

#3 I think it only makes sense that GG will support OpenGL in their engines again because we're indie and I think OpenGL is the only graphics layer that can support our markets.

#4 I don't get the indie = opengl argument.

Now, I can understand a indie targeting niche markets such as Mac users...requiring opengl.

But I also know a lot of indies who go for portal requirements of DX when targeting Windows users.

#5 Well yes, I think its due to its multiplataform nature, and the generalized intuition of OpenGL having better performance than DirectX, what at least before DX10, is slightly true.

#6 I don't get the indie = opengl argument.

Well that could be perceived as an ignorant statement to any indie developers developing games on Mac or Linux platforms. You are assuming all indie developers develop on Windows or should switch platforms to develop indie games. I think Unity, Ogre, and Blender have proven this assumption to be wrong already.

It would be interesting to know, will DirectX games on InstantAction.com run in Mac or Linux browsers?

I see the Linux Desktop (Ubuntu) and Mac "niche" markets growing steadily in the foreseeable future. Do we really want to ignore the 6-12 million Ubuntu users, or 22 million OS X users? No matter what your argument is, it makes sense for indie developers with very limited resources to target these less competitive growing markets.

#7 Not really. I just don't see logic in categorizing indies as "gl" or "dx" specific entities. Right now there is huge market potential for indies in portals as that is a direct stream that has been of use in the past, and portals are often DX only. Affiliate programs and such are a nice link, but I don't know if they "work". New initiatives are on their way and several in experimental forms happening now.

I don't get how it would be an ignorant statement in the least, however. Because I don't see indie developers that are targeting the Linux or Mac markets as having GL define their identity as developers. It is what they use, of course, but that's because that is what is supported on their platforms of choice. By the "ignorance" of logic, in a truly binary universe, saying "GL = indie" is a slap in the face to every developer who uses DX. In reality, that's not the case because there is much more than graphics API's at work in indie development. It seems horribly reductionist to use DX or GL as a definition of indie-ness. Of course, I see it as pointless to use markets as an absolute definition of what it is to be indie as well. Then you wouldn't have indie FPS's or RPG's on Windows because those are defined by being both DX based (non-indie), on Windows (non-indie OS), and of a popular genre targeted by the big guns (again non-indie).

It just seems to pointless and limiting to reduce indie developers to GL or DX (or an OS or market, even). Because according to the gl logic, none of the DarkBasic or Blitz3D developers are indies.

Which is why I still don't get it as a logical argument.

#8 It is true, OpenGL is not the sole identity of indie developers. I misread your statement as indirectly expressing that OpenGL is not very important to indie developers, not that you were actually implying that someone was actually making some binary true/false - 0/1 statement about the identity of indie developers.

I am not saying that OpenGL is the identity of all indie developers. However, I think it is very possible that the majority of developers targeting Linux and Mac are indie, so OpenGL could be very important to some indies. Then there are the developers who are actually developing on those platforms, like owners of Unity, who probably find OpenGL to be indispensable.

Seriously, who looks at these debate as purely binary arguments. Nobody is getting slapped in the face here...

#9 Indeed, there is not a matter of a fanatic polarized thing, its just a tendence. Anyone lost on a binary belief, is just that, lost. I agree on the absurd of extremely categorization- in the end, is just another form of binary thinking.

For the rest, yes, there are indies who focus on portals, but there is this logic path to follow for the majority of indies to look for oportunities to reach bigger markets, and one of the well known helpers on that, is the OpenGL API. It always has been. From there, I think, comes the cult and permanently association between indie and OGL.

#10 You know, what I miss is the days when torque was for "hobbiests" as well as "indies".

I'm a hobbiest. I don't really intend to release a real game of my own anytime soon, and if I do, I'm not really worried about making money from it. I've been in technology for a while now, at my day job I'm a linux&unix sysadmin and developer at a small company. What I'm interested in is just playing with the technology, learning how it works. If I happen to make a game along the way, then all's well and good, but at least in the meanwhile I was happy and content just messing with torque.

I guess the short version of the above is that... ignoring the opengl vs dx debate, I simply need linux and mac support to do hobbiest activities my way. It's why I purchased torque, it's the value that torque provides that other engines [at the time] didn't. I suspect I'm not unique.

OpenGL support is a base part of supporting linux and mac, even if GG don't [or won't] actively support the platforms themselves. Historically, your happy hobbiest users have been happy to do a lot of platform support themselves, but there's a level of open hostility that is "not supporting opengl" that goes above and beyond what a hobbiest needs just to maintain interest in the company/product.


Back to indies ... A lot of them obviously require opengl [from reading this thread and from reading the comments on the blog that spawned this thread] - something that I think GG is ignoring and suffering a loss in its older community members because of.

Sure, there's a lot of money to be made by supporting windows and the xbox and focussing all your development there, but... that's not fun. That's not considerate to long-term community members. That's just greed, and it's not what a lot of community members paid to sign up for. That's not something that people in their garage care for. It seems to me [completely on the outside] that GG have just lost their way a little.


The last point of David's, about DX/Indie, the point isn't that directx or opengl is necessarily indie, it's that each company has a value assigned to how well it supports what sorts of independant developers. By chucking opengl, GG's value on this scale goes down - leaving themselves no higher than darkbasic or blitz3d. GG is throwing out the things that make it unique and better than the alternatives.

Gary (-;

#11 I agree, Gary. I'm more of a hobbyist than I am an indie. And I'm an avid fan of BlitzMax and Unity because they give me a quick dev buzz.

#12 37% of our total sales are on the OSX platform (47% of 2007 sales were OSX). The conversion rate is also significantly higher than Windows users.

Edit: Typo

#13 28% of gish activations went on linux and mac
Almost 60% of tribal trouble activations were on linux and mac. more than half of tribal trouble sales weren't for windows.

You know, for want of some more real sales figures.

Gary (-;

#14 75% of Penguins Arena sales are on OSX.
No Mac support, no more game with Torque, it's simple as that.

#15 It is nice to hear of stats like these. I was also pleasantly surprised to see in the thread Gary linked to that Dark Horizons had good sales on Linspire Linux through their Click-N-Run service, which is now available for many Debian based Linux distros. www.cnr.com/index.seam

#16 Wow, thanks for the objective numbers, y'all.

I've long felt that only a fool would tie his business to a single proprietary platform, if he had a choice in the matter. But I really do think the days of Windows dominance on the PC platform are declining--quite visibly.

I don't care about the graphics layer, per se--I just want to know I can use it on any platform, so that I don't have to bet the farm on one of them.

#17 Good point. Beeing hobbiest, indie, or whatever dont private ourselves of thinking about deepest issues on the industry. The consequences of allowing/supporting conforming hegemonies comes back to nock our door sooner or later.

Specifically on the matter, is also good to remember that unlike the deceptive argument about DirectX beeing now multiplataform due to Xbox, the OpenGL does cross the line of the computer type plataform, beeing present on various Nintendo consoles, and several cell phones.

#18 Ah, this thread takes me back to 2004. And I gave up on GG ever doing anything else with opengl in March of 2007. How time flies when you finally stop waiting on GG to catch up to the marketing hype and roll your own solution.

#19 I ordered one of the Linspire (or Lindows, I can't remember now) machines from Wal-Mart back in the day. I hated it. It felt like the worst of the adware world when using it. It was a cool link hookup for the Lore team, but damn I hated it. Logging in...Hello...would you like a $39.95 super-speedy login advance package? No. Just get me to my desktop. Are you sure? This is a good deal! Yes, take me to my desktop. Yes you would like our special offer? No. We are truly sorry. Please put in your e-mail address to let us send you other offers. No. Please put in your e-mail address to let us send you other offers. FINE! Just get me to my damn desktop! Your desktop is so sparse. Would you like $19.95 Multi-desktop Hawaii background package? No. Are you sure? Fine. I like Hawaii; give it to me. I'm sorry, but you must configure networking to be able to purchase this special offer. Grrrr. Configure networking. Would you like the $49.95 networking wizard? Sure. I hate configuring networking on Linux almost as much as X configuration, so this would be handy...Sorry, but you have to configure networking to purchase this item. But it will make configuring networking the next time much easier. I have never been so happy to install Windows in my life.

Hopefully they got better. I have avoided them like the plague ever since. I love other distros, but oy!

#20 Yes, Linspire has changed a bit. Does still seem to be modeling itself after Microsoft. It prays on the ignorant. I mean it is based off of Ubuntu and you can upgrade some features for a fee. However, there a many "'attachments" that will do the same thing for free. If not you can just goto the forum and look it up. I too in the past have purchased Linspire, biggest waste of money. I do like the CNR idea and have downloaded stuff from it for ubuntu. But yeah, linspire has kinda turned into the red-headed step child of the linux community in my mind. I personally have only been using linux for a few years. The "ease of use" for linux has come so far forward it is amazing. If you haven't given linux a look in a while I highly suggest that you do. Not going to get into a debate about which is better.

From an openGL standpoint I have always hoped that GG would support it a bit more. I own all three, but find myself messing around with python-ogre. I still occasionally play with TGE, or TGB on my Mac. To me the thing that had made GG special was the cross-platform stuff. Which I see it has basically lost, well with TGEA and TGB. (yes we can debate TGB). I have yet to ask for a refund because I hope the Torque2 will have some sort of openGL and current owners get a discount. Plus looking at the code I learned a lot, so it would be like returning a book.

I will have to plead ignorance about openGL and DirectX. Is openGL horrible on windows systems? The information that I found (openGl's website) showed that the current openGl stuff ran as good on windows as DirectX. Is DirectX that much easier to work with? I know there is more to compatibilty than just the DirectX/openGL but it seems to me that if you are making a product for PC's why wouldn't openGL be chosen? I know that for certain console, xbox, that probably requires DirectX. How much money is being pulled in from that? Guess one could argue the "expectations". Then I guess another could counter with "expectations" of a Nintendo console. So I am a bit confused.