Nintendo's Switch Game Console Is Vulkan & OpenGL Conformant

[cj.wijtmans]

BTW Linux desktop market share is 2.3%, just not with Steam installed and you all know why. Chicken-and-egg...

impressive. almost a 1% increase from last year. (november 2016 vs november 2015)

[cj.wijtmans]

It's easy to support many distros with one build on Linux. Ship your libraries with your application. It's been a solved issue since Loki started shipping games in 1999. The hard to support many distros argument is an argument that's made in ignorance of the development process. This is a solved issue.

At one point it will break between kernels or even lower level libraries... even glibc changed behavior between several years i think. But i think inlcuding libraries down until glibc gives your game several years of lifetime which should be enough untill a rehash, remake, bugfixes or whatever.

[cj.wijtmans]

So why dont they just port their pokemon games to android for a 2$ price tag. Insta billion $$.

[Almindor]

I understand your opinion on this, but I have a different one. Porting a game, especially in-house, allows your code to be more portable, and allows you to find bugs that are far more vocal on one platform than another. Case in point, XP to Vista. XP had horrible memory management, and it would let any program touch any memory it wanted to. Vista came out and introduced the Windows version of a segfault for going out of the assigned memory space. Many Windows programming shops interpreted this as a problem with Vista, when it was actually that their random pointer errors sometimes pointed to a thing that allowed the program to keep going and Vista didn't allow that anymore.

Additionally, abstraction layers like SDL2 have helped many games become more stable and rely on less custom code for OS interaction and were implemented during porting to another OS.

I agree with you on the technical side of things here, but it just doesn't make business sense. Bethesda is in it for the money. I port my projects to as many platforms as I'm able and also always try to get them portable from the get-go. But doing that as a commercial entity has to have commercial sense, and right now, with the state of linux gaming it doesn't make one.

It's like asking a US company to make their electronics work with power plugs from that one country in the world with 1 million people and a special power standard that tends to change every now and then too.

[Almindor]

It's easy to support many distros with one build on Linux. Ship your libraries with your application. It's been a solved issue since Loki started shipping games in 1999. The hard to support many distros argument is an argument that's made in ignorance of the development process. This is a solved issue.

No it's not. Even now games fail on steam in "non supported distroes" due to gnu libC ABI breakage and other magical abstraction hoopla.
I'm quite at home with programming, coded a few projects including a game and supporting closed source deployment on linux is not simple at all.

You provide your .so library with your game but it won't work because GLIBC_VERSION error which goes all the way down to libc incompatibility. And because linux refuses to abstract the kernel syscalls interface from a particular language's runtime library it will never work properly.
It might get a bit more stable but there's always ABI breakage possibility.

All they'd have to do is introduce a "libkernel" before libc written in pure compliant C and literally never changed except for additions and it'd be nice and backwards compatible. Add major versioning for those breakage needs and all things would work nicely.

[Delgarde]

No it's not. Even now games fail on steam in "non supported distroes" due to gnu libC ABI breakage and other magical abstraction hoopla.
I'm quite at home with programming, coded a few projects including a game and supporting closed source deployment on linux is not simple at all.

In my experience, it's not libc ABI breakage that breaks Steam games on other distros - it's the screwing around with libraries in an attempt to provide Ubuntu compatibility when not actually required.

I've not seen it for a while so it may be fixed, but the biggest cause of problems I've seen with Steam on Fedora was that Steam was overriding Fedora system libraries with older Ubuntu versions... breaking linking for other libraries depending on symbols exported by newer versions. From memory, this showed up as having games fallback to software rendering, because messing around with libraries prevented the system GL libraries from loading correctly.

[starshipeleven]

No it's not. Even now games fail on steam in "non supported distroes" due to gnu libC ABI breakage and other magical abstraction hoopla.

Dunno, all times there is breakage with glibc in Steam games it's Steam's bundled glibc that got reinstalled out of the blue and the fix is always "go and nuke it together with some other random garbage libs".

I've never heard of this "glibc ABI breakage" you are talking about.

[srkelley5]

They might have used some decent hardware this time, but personally I don't think it should be regarded positively either way. The problem is that while it's possible to make great games with crap hardware as Nintendo has literally always done (all of their consoles have been low-end, hardware-wise), most third-party publishers have moved away from exclusive titles for one console. Consumers and thus publishers want cross-platform software and it's still going to be difficult with Nintendo hardware because it won't have the same power as the other options on the market (PS4, XBone, PC).

All that said, however, it's at least good news that they will use some standards. At least it can help publishers more easily bring previous-generation games to it.

The NES only had one console competitor and it wasn't leaps and bounds beyond it. SNES was superior. N64 was superior. Gamecube beat the PS2 and Dreamcast absolutely, the Xbox only had programmable shaders and more RAM. Nintendo usually competes well on hardware, they have only pulled back on that when they decided to pcomplete on content since the most powerful game console has never won a generation (til now with the PS4 anyway, it's definitely going to win).

[Min1123]

I agree with you on the technical side of things here, but it just doesn't make business sense. Bethesda is in it for the money. I port my projects to as many platforms as I'm able and also always try to get them portable from the get-go. But doing that as a commercial entity has to have commercial sense, and right now, with the state of linux gaming it doesn't make one.

Yes, I had hoped the SteamBox would change this by becoming a popular console that ran the same games that Linux computers did. Win 8 didn't drop the ball long enough for a Valve (see notorious delays, any Half-Life game) play to make it, and so it never became just another console for AAA devs to port things to.

That's a mixed blessing though. We don't have the games that would have come out of that, but we also aren't locked in to supporting the libraries on such a console indefinitely as we would have had it caught on.

[Awesomeness]

Nintendo? Supporting a widespread standard?!

A rumor from last year said that the Switch (then referred to as the NX) would use Android. Considering that the Switch's hardware is basically a refreshed NVidia Shield Tablet (which runs Android) with attached controllers, chances are NVidia approached Nintendo and just licensed the whole platform to them.

If I was at Nintendo, I'd keep everything performance-related NVidia developed – that includes Vulkan and OpenGL drivers – and rely on my proprietary network services and unique controllers for vendor lock-in.