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Watch How NVIDIA & Valve Ported Source To Linux

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  • #11
    I don't know why it posted in this thread. I typed it up in the other one. Bizarre.

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    • #12
      At the end they say there looking at open-sourcing a DX->OpenGL wrapper, so we could start to see a bunch more game ports from that ☺

      Also they recommend that people develop under OpenGL rather than Direct3D. Or at least the nvidia guy did, the Valve guy pointed out Intel had craptastic drivers for some chips so I don't know if we will be seeing HL3 as OpenGL by default...

      Also it would be nice to see the steam hardware survey give figures for actual OpenGL capabilities rather than just the level of DirectX support and what it's rough OpenGL equivalent is. Linux might have a lot fewer OpenGL capable users and the Intel opensource ones are still at 3.x levels. Does a Windows system that supports a certain level of DirectX necessaries have OpenGL support, after all MS would require DX for certification but have no reqs for OpenGL so there could be plenty of Windows systems that have poor OpenGL support, maybe there are plenty of people who are just using the Windows drivers rather than installing the vendor ones. Also what extensions are realistically usable.

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      • #13
        From what I could find by googling (basically nothing), ToGL is closed source. Great. So they expect every little developer shop to implement their own D3D to OpenGL translation layer? May as well just run your app on wine or winelib.

        Maybe Nvidia and Valve have the resources combined to do that, but it's really a huge effort. They should open source the generally useful ToGL code to help all developers. They only stand to benefit, as you would start seeing many more games on Linux if developers could just port their windowing/input code to SDL and use ToGL for all the rendering, fix a few bugs, ship it, done. I wonder if ToGL is advanced enough to handle Unreal Engine 3 games...

        Anyway, really asanine move by Nvidia and Valve not to open source that component at least.

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        • #14
          For ut3 there is icculus' mojoshader(unity engine uses this too):
          Make Direct3D shaders work on OpenGL, Metal, and Vulkan


          Or can you do something more with ToGL?

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          • #15
            Originally posted by tuke81 View Post
            For ut3 there is icculus' mojoshader(unity engine uses this too):
            Make Direct3D shaders work on OpenGL, Metal, and Vulkan


            Or can you do something more with ToGL?
            As far as I know, MojoShader only translates shaders, not API calls. ToGL should do those too.

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            • #16
              I just can figure it out

              What about the MAC versions of all major Valve's titles??? They are for sure already using OpenGL natively.... so opengl shouldn't be any new thing for Valve's developers. I simply can't understand why there is not a pure opengl version of this games in Linux

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              • #17
                Originally posted by H3g3m0n View Post
                At the end they say there looking at open-sourcing a DX->OpenGL wrapper, so we could start to see a bunch more game ports from that ☺
                That would be a mighty blessing for Linux gamers.

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by TheScorpion View Post
                  What about the MAC versions of all major Valve's titles??? They are for sure already using OpenGL natively.... so opengl shouldn't be any new thing for Valve's developers. I simply can't understand why there is not a pure opengl version of this games in Linux
                  I doubt the Mac games are using an OpenGL engine.

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                  • #19
                    Originally posted by johnc View Post
                    I doubt the Mac games are using an OpenGL engine.
                    I'm pretty sure they are doing the same thing, translating DX to OGL.

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                    • #20
                      Originally posted by johnc View Post
                      I doubt the Mac games are using an OpenGL engine.
                      Mac only supports OpenGL. However, it's very possible they're using Transgaming's Cider product there.

                      Originally posted by H3g3m0n
                      Does a Windows system that supports a certain level of DirectX necessaries have OpenGL support, after all MS would require DX for certification but have no reqs for OpenGL so there could be plenty of Windows systems that have poor OpenGL support, maybe there are plenty of people who are just using the Windows drivers rather than installing the vendor ones. Also what extensions are realistically usable.
                      Windows GL drivers are often extremely out of date. A D3D10-capable card for instance will for-sure ship with appropriate D3D drivers but might not ship feature-comparable-GL drivers until months later (sometimes more than a year). Speaking of Intel, they have D3D10-capable hardware that shipped with GL 2.1 drivers which haven't been updated past 3.1 (despite GL not coming close to D3D10 features until GL 3.2). Even when the drivers do support a particular version of GL, the support is often incomplete or extremely buggy until yet more driver releases later.

                      The bugginess is a real issue that affects many indie game developers. id or Valve can call up an NVIDIA account rep or engineer and bitch about a bug to get it fixed. Indie developers cannot.

                      http://www.g-truc.net/doc/OpenGL%20status%202013-04.pdf - note his graphs there are measuring "new features in verison X", so when it claims 100% GL 4.2 for NVIDIA, that only means that 100% of new feature are supported and working, not that 100% of all features required by 4.2 work. The tests are also rather simple samples that won't showcase certain bugs that require a non-trivial combination of API calls to trigger which typically are only found in real game engines or very targeted and specific bug reproduction tests.

                      Originally posted by H3g3m0n
                      Also they recommend that people develop under OpenGL rather than Direct3D. Or at least the nvidia guy did
                      The NVIDIA guy is one of their research-oriented OpenGL developers, iirc. Wee bit biased. I'd be distrustful of taking advice from some of the Microsoft DirectX developers, too. Some of them hit the Kool-aid pretty hard. A couple friends working on the XBone are so ridiculously blind to why gamers and even many developers have taken to the PS4 it's almost funny (almost). Listen to game developers with experience writing new graphics engines, not research engineers or driver developers or companies porting ancient D3D9 engines.

                      In any case, for most developers the choice to go OpenGL is already forced on you - non-Windows platforms don't give you any options. Hence the recent resurgance of GL popularity; iOS uses it exclusively. I'd be really interested in seeing what would happen if one of the two major mobile platforms (iOS and Android, of course) supported D3D or a D3D-like API. Likewise, if Microsoft weren't over a half-decade late to the party, maybe the native D3D support in Windows Phone would be more relevant to mobile app developers. "What-Ifs" are just that, though.

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