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so it appears anyway
"On Monday, Apple announced a new gaming development platform, dubbed Metal, at its Worldwide Developer Conference. The platform, much like DirectX12 or Mantle, bypasses the overhead of OpenGL, which currently serves as the standard for 3D graphics in iOS games and apps."
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/06...ment-platform/
I would buy one if they designed it to look like an actual apple.
Like.. a little green apple resting on a pedestal, and on the pedestal is a button to turn it on.
And when you turn it on the apple starts to glow with a soothing greenish light.
^ i hope they do a red one too
^Nah, I'd want it to look like this just for laughs
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ippinfront.jpg
Apple has been in the game market, as least in mobile/portable, for several years now. It's been that way since the iPhone third party SDK was released with iOS 2.0. In fact, many of their iPhone and iPod Touch ads since then have featured games on them (and one of them referred to the iPod Touch as the "funnest iPod yet.").
"Metal" is just a streamlined programming interface for 3D gaming that allows programmers to get closer to the hardware, or "metal," if you were. OpenGL, which they used before, is great, exists on just about every platform in existence (Windows, Mac, Linux, PS3 and PS4, etc.), and is pretty much the standard 3D programming interface in the industry. However, between not really being designed for gaming and being required to be platform agnostic, it's not the most efficient interface out there -- especially when compared to more streamlined ones like DirectX. Metal is just Apple's answer to DirectX.
Streamlined API that runs on their new chipsets. This will allow the next gen Apple TV to be a serious choice as a game console.
Mantle is supposedly the way to go over OpenGL in the PC space, but they're in still closed beta. Right now OpenGL is getting ripped apart by criticism and arguing between developers.
Well, Mantle is only supported by AMD right now. When NVidia and Intel (and perhaps a few others) sign on, then we'll see. It also doesn't help that AMD hasn't opened up the specs for it yet. It's also PC/Windows only, apparently.
OpenGL, for better or worse, is pretty much the only cross-platform option out there that's supported by everybody.
A non MS run gaming API is what the PC market has needed for years. Even if it isn't perfect at least the door is being opened.
When I read the thread title, the first thing I thought of was Pippin 2.:rofl:
I can see developers not giving a damn and ignoring Metal just by the nature of the API being exclusive to Apple products.
Apple is going to need to spend a lot on money hatting if they want games optimized for it.
I dunno man, people actually programmed in Objective-C. Pretty sure that's considered self-flagellation in some countries.Quote:
Originally Posted by Knuckle Duster
Well, EA and Epic seemed excited by it... but they were also hand picked to talk about it at the keynote.Quote:
Originally Posted by Knuckle Duster
Now, now. Objective-C is quite a nice language and is very elegant in its own way (more so than some other, more popular, languages, like C++, for example). Sure, its syntax looks a bit funky, but that's only if you've never worked with Smalltalk (one of the most elegant languages ever, IMHO).Quote:
Originally Posted by Kamahl
A half-assed mess of C and Smalltalk syntax is not elegant like Smalltalk. There's nothing elegant about Objective-C.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dragonmaster Lou
You cannot bolt two things together with no rime or reason and call that "elegant".
C++ is a huge mess too, but that's another discussion, and it's mostly the fault of extremely poor libraries. After I've programmed with SFML, I needed no further proof that the fault lies elsewhere.
I'd argue that Objective-C's message-based dynamic dispatch mechanism, funky syntax be damned, is quite elegant. It's the only compiled-to-native language that I know of, other than Apple's new Swift language, that uses loose typing like that for method calls. All the others are interpreted languages like Ruby and Python.
Swift cleans up the syntax while keeping all of Objective-C's nicer features.
C++ gets a lot of crap, admittedly, whether due to libraries or not. I work with C++ on a daily basis and I like it for the most part anyway.
Eero already did that, while having even nicer syntax than Swift (I'm biased towards python/lua style syntax though so take that with a grain of salt). By now C# must have a way to do it too, it's the most everything and the kitchen sink language ever.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dragonmaster Lou
Besides working with libraries still designed for C++ compilers from 1993 (meaning a mix of C, macros and 0 RAII), most complaints I had were minor, and fixed with C++11.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dragonmaster Lou
The STL is pretty damn ugly imo though (not as much from a design standpoint, more from a it's just freaking ugly point).
I actually like C++ memory management more than garbage collection now. Knowing exactly when everything is getting freed is pretty damn nice and allows much nicer usage of system resources like files and sockets.
You just have to stick to good practices like they're religious commandments.
The modern ARC thing of objective C is pretty nice too, but I don't like that there's multiple kinds of "weak" references (there's that unowned bullshit too or whatever). That's just confusing.