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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Game consoles - proprietary 3D APIs

OpenGL != OpenGL ES != WebGL, yes they are all based on the same concepts, but require separate code paths and different shader versions.

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On Linux (I assume Mac too but haven't tried), you can force yourself to OpenGL ES. In fact, I would recommend it. The nice thing about OpenGL ES is that there is only one main way to do things so it is a lot harder to use something slow like glBegin().

> OpenGL != OpenGL ES != WebGL

Whilst technically true, WebGL is designed to have API compatibility with OpenGL ES (2), which in turn is based off of OpenGL (2). OpenGL ES 3 and WebGL 2 are beginning to emerge and are based off of OpenGL 3. In my experience shaders that work with WebGL will also work with OpenGL ES 2 and OpenGL 2.1. Equivalent versions tend to use the same concepts. On the other hand, code written for desktop (v3+) won't work on mobile, because the desktop version is one version ahead of mobile (and I imagind that it will be for several more versions).

You can more-or-less program to the OpenGL ES API under full desktop OpenGL, since ES is a subset of the full API.

> Game consoles - proprietary 3D APIs

Back in the day that was true, but I don't think that's the case these days. Xbox is obviously DirectX. Wii was OpenGL, and I think Sony used OpenGL as well.

Sony have some shitty support for OpenGL. Any developer worth his salt used Sony's API.

Wii had its own API too, though closer to OpenGL, still wasn't OpenGL.

I'm a huge fan of OpenGL, but evangelists have been spreading misinformation about OpenGL just as much as they accuse DirectX as.

I really don't get how OpenGL support for consoles became such a urban legend.

Anyone that cares about graphics programming on game consoles knows how broken or non existent such support is.

It's because console development is a fairly secretive process. The SDKs are all kept under a fairly tight lid, and unless you either work with it yourself or personally know someone who is willing to spill the beans, you cannot get a good idea of the process.

True, but that is no reason to start spreading the falsehood that OpenGL is everywhere used on consoles, as many FOSS advocates do.

Specially when enough information is actually publicly available for anyone that cares about game development, in online forums, games magazines, conferences and game courses.

To be fair, the reason I though the Wii supported OpenGL was because that's what I thought I read from Nintendo when I was seriously considering writing some homebrew games for my Wii.

As to why and where I gained this misinformation I don't know. But somewhere along the line I've gotten my wires crossed.

Maybe the homebrew libs (libogc) support OpenGL? I doubt that you can use to original Nintendo SDK to write homebrew.

With the game programming being secretive and so many people only being able to discuss it anonymously there should be a way to separate insiders from people who like to pretend to be one on the internet. "PS2/3/4 OpenGL" is one shibboleth we can use for this purpose.

The funny thing is that for the PS you don't even need to be an insider, as Sony makes many of their papers freely available.

Keep in mind that DirectX and OpenGL are first and foremost abstraction layer on top of the GPU. Consoles have a fixed hardware, so you can skip a large part of these and write code directly for the GPU.

I don't know how much still holds for the XBox One, but for instance the XBox 360 version of DirectX is very different from the PC version: it's much closer to the metal and exposes pretty much all the GPU functionalities.

Here is a thread talking about XBox 360 dev: http://beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=62049

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