eliasdaler

This is a pretty baffling development.

Currently, we have highly specialized apps which do exactly what they need to do. They were created by someone who cares about making the program which works right and reliably. Most programs have years of bug fixes and deterministic algorithms. Many of them run locally and waste a minimum amount of energy to do the calculation.

But this is different - this encourages you to make one-off apps for each little thing you want to do. Imagine someone making a "bill splitter" app every time they go out with friends and how much energy that would waste... Just to do "14+16" that you could do in your head.

Also imagine it coming up with new UIs every time (depending on the prompt/context), and even potentially gaslighting you and doing calculations wrong because no one ever tested it before.

This showcases why free software is important. Geo-locking is a such hostile practice which makes zero sense here.

If the software/firmware was free and open, you’d be able to patch out/disable the geo-lock. But it probably wouldn’t be there in the first place…

Thanks a lot! Good luck with your engine as well :)

Glad you enjoyed it! :)

> Not sure if I’ll be able to do their new guide, my laptop can’t run some of the more recent versions of Vulkan

If your laptop got still GPU driver updates in 2022 or later, it should probably support Vulkan 1.3. You can install Vulkan SDK (or just extract the archive) and check your Vulkan version by running the supplied "vulkaninfo" program.

For example, my 5 year old Thinkpad T490 fully supports Vulkan 1.3 and it only has an iGPU! :)

You'll need 1k LOC to draw a single triangle and not 10-20k.

Sticking with OpenGL is understandable, but I can recommend learning some Vulkan as a side project (with the help of vkguide) without too much commitment. That's how I started and it turned out to be not as bad as I imagined! Uour mileage may vary, of course.

Thank you! :)

I guess libraries like bgfx, sokol and The Forge are kinda like that. But I just feel like it’s either all or nothing if you’re already doing your own game engine.

I’m okay with using middleware/3rd party libraries for things which I don’t care too much about (e.g. physics), but graphics is such a core component that I want to handle it myself.

In a way, OpenGL drivers were such middleware libraries written for you by GPU vendors (or open source community). But now they stopped doing that and now you’re either writing your own graphics abstraction layer or using someone else’s.

In this case, I choose the hard way. And it seemed to have worked out so far. I definitely won’t recommend it to everyone (especially if they want to make a game in less than a year!), but as a learning experience it was fun.

Yeah. Even though it might seem I’m 100% enjoying Vulkan, I still wish there was something closer to OpenGL and which was supported by GPU manufacturers. Other 3d party graphics frameworks are not bad, but you don’t feel the same confidence in their future in the same way as you did about OpenGL.

Thanks! :D