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Comment by ggregoire | Hacker News Reader

What does that mean for games like League of Legends running on OpenGL? (https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/trip-down-lol-graphic...)

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Riot probably has enough resources to pay its developers to target Metal on macOS by the time OpenGL is removed (some number of years from now).

It’s the smaller scale developers and projects that might not have have such ability.

The smaller scale ones are generally using an existing engine like Unity or Unreal, which handles Metal support.

Generally, yes. Certainly not all. The likes of SFML and SDL2 and libgdx have zero support for Metal, although SDL2 did recently add support for Vulkan.

How far back did Unity/Unreal transparently handle Metal support? I suspect some developers won't have the resources to update games running on older versions of those engines.

Games made by developers who've gone out of business are probably just going to stop working in a few versions of MacOS.

Certainly has enough resources. Their 2015 revenue estimate was $1.6 billion. 2,500 employees in 2017.

(Not intending to nitpick--just pointing out that Riot is a LOT bigger than many folks realize)

Perhaps they could use some middleware like MoltenGL [0]. That way they might still be able to write against an OpenGL API (which allows for code re-use), while supporting Metal under the hood. It does seem this particular tech might be more suited for mobile platforms, unless OpenGL ES is also used these days on the PC / Mac platforms.

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[0]: https://moltengl.com/moltengl/

I guess an eventual port to Metal, like WoW.

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