Moderator: GZDoom Developers
Graf Zahl wrote:do you remember how long it took to make ZDoom work on it?
fakemai wrote:Ideally GZDoom's code is architecture-agnostic but if it moves to Vulkan-only it won't actually be used except on a few types of platforms, and very few will be 32-bit, which isn't necessarily true at the moment with OpenGL 3.3 as the baseline.
Graf Zahl wrote:I think you are overgeneralizing from a few isolated occurences. Regarding 64 bit - do you remember how long it took to make ZDoom work on it?
It's often not easy to transition older existing code bases to the new architecture. That all takes some time and especially in the early years of 64 bit systems there wasn't much to be gained from making 64 bit software because a) 32 bit was still a significant chunk of the market and b) it also ran without problems on all 64 bit systems. So obviously the transition was made gradually.
But in the end it's hard to say what was the main driving force here because the bit-ness transition happened nearly simultaneously on both consoles and PCs.
Sorry, but here I disagree. Having developed an OpenGL based engine myself I experienced first hand how bad some of these drivers were - and how bad the OpenGL specs were. People were using it where they had to but up until GL 4.2 it all was a major clusterfuck of bad decisions that held it back. And even after 4.2 it was economically safer to go the D3D route on Windows if you wanted proper support on Intel and AMD.
Chris wrote:Graf Zahl wrote:So is it really the case that PC gaming went from "not worth making a 64-bit version at all, even as a future-proof option, because 32-bit was too significant" to "not worth making a 32-bit version at all, even as a low-end option, because 64-bit is so dominant"? There was never a point where 32-bit was still somewhat significant while 64-bit could also be a benefit?
Chris wrote:Fair enough. Still, it seems odd to me to not even play with the possibility of what you could get from OpenGL via an extension or two on top of what's already there for porting purposes. Even if D3D was the only official renderer on Windows, leaving OpenGL as an undocumented dev option for devs to play around with potential future hardware capabilities doesn't seem to be that big of a leap, given the code is largely platform agnostic. It would also help the quality of the ports by having another platform to test the OpenGL render code on (echoes of the reasons why Carmack liked writing portable code and tested on platforms they never officially supported).
Graf Zahl wrote:The thing is, if the game needs to run in 32 bit anyway there is very little point going the extra mile to do a 64 bit version. So for most publishers it simply went like "32 bit as long as we get away with it". Doing both a 32 and 64 bit version requires more development and more testing time and that'd be a pointless expense unless you need both working anyway.
What would the developers have gotten from developing an OpenGL Windows version? It probably would have cost more than it was worth.
What kind of rude awakening though?Graf Zahl wrote:You mean Vulkan on 32 bit systems? Very few, actually, considering how old these computers are. But some people still 32 bit Windows on 64 bit CPUs because for them running 16 bit stuff is more important than modern software. But those will inevitably have a rude awakening waiting for them in the future.
Return to ZDoom (and related) News
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 0 guests