Roadmap for TDM in 2020

[nbohr1more 2089]

I hate to join the chorus of negativity but I honestly feel like Vulkan itself is a bad move.

 

It pretends to be a modernized "clean slate" OpenGL but it really just encourages vendor lock-in since it is so closely tied to the hardware.

 

It is mostly big industry players getting together and going "why do we need a flexible open standard when we are the only players left?"

then collaborating on a standard that will only work for big industry players.

 

The only thing I can say for it's defence is that OpenGL has been tainted by Nvidia's overwhelming ARB voting influence which

has caused AMD to always be crippled in OpenGL performance.

 

With Vulkan, AMD can equal or best Nvidia because they can force developers to write to their hardware directly.

AMD is mostly behind this Vulkan push. They started things with their "Close to Metal" GPGPU initiative then developed Mantle

then co-developed DX12.

 

All these moves are addressing two issues at AMD.

The aforementioned Nvidia control of the OpenGL standard and the fact that their driver teams are short staffed and less capable than Nvidia's.

Why hire more OpenGL driver devs when you can get engine developers to write their own drivers via the Vukan or DX12 API?

I can't fault it as a "strategy" but I'm not a fan of it as a standard. I guess PowerVR is pretty glad to see it too though. They also were

living in the shadow of Nvidia's voting power in the OpenGL ARB and were happy to have a way to bypass that too (and even happier to offload driver

development to engine devs).

[Jedibeeftrix 0]

Vulkan is the only future.

OpenGL drivers are going to get less and less attention from Intel, AMD and nVidia going forward.

So unless the hope is to run TDM over an OpenGL > Vulkan wrapper then it gets increasingly hard to see how any Intel Skylake and higher, AMD GCN 3rd and higher, Nvidia Kepler and higher get to play TDM (which is perhaps a perfectly valid strategy).

And if this is the strategy, then it's far enough in the future before OpenGL driver updates stagnate that it doesn't need to be worried about yet.

Edited April 3, 2020 by Jedibeeftrix

[stgatilov 1128]

46 minutes ago, Jedibeeftrix said:

Vulkan is the only future.

OpenGL drivers are going to get less and less attention from Intel, AMD and nVidia going forward.

Hmm... you cannot imagine how much software works on OpenGL.
As for now, all those vendors would more likely drop support for Vulkan, calling it a "failure", than drop support for OpenGL

[HMart 318]

IMO Opengl will never go away (unless you are Apple), there millions of software in the wild that don't need the close to the metal performance of Vulkan, many indie games for example will be OpenGL for years to come, hardware vendors will be unhappy but they will have to still support OpenGL essentially forever, 20 years from now you will still be able to play OpenGL games of today, like you can still play directdraw games from the 90's, at the same time, they will be happy that OpenGL will stagnate at some point in the future and they will just need to maintain that version, instead of constantly having to adapt to new OpenGL.

nbohr1more imo Nvidia still has a huge influence over Vulkan, is not only the new Vulkan raytracing based on RTX but also Kronos president is from Nvidia.

Edited April 3, 2020 by HMart

[Betaversion 1]

@SNOWY

On 3/8/2020 at 11:32 AM, snowy said:

I think that instead of requesting more features and better tech, a better move forward would be simplification. Simplification of code, coding workflow and more accessible tools to create new content, especially for new content creators.

Yes!... THAT's the way to give this game a prosperous long life. I'm a (very rusty) amateur map-maker (Enemy Territory and Urban Terror) from years ago, and am just-now beginning to re-learn those skills... I want to be able to contribute material to the community. The KISS principle should always be kept in mind as a guiding rule for development.

Also, changing the subject... It would be so nice to have, as an option for map-making, multiplayer team CTF or other objective-based team-vs-team challenges. I think it would be hilarious (in a good way, both funny and fun) to be able to use the resources and 'feel' of TDM for massed team-vs-team combat/challenges.

Of course, that's for the (not too distant I hope) future of TDM development... But just think of it: Shadowy Steam Punk Goes to War!... I imagine there'd be a sizeable influx of players migrating from ET, UT and other Quake-based games.

Just a suggestion. Cheers everyone.