I'm guessing this is yet another API like Mantle/Vulkan that is also seated comfortably in the Apple walled garden and increases the development costs: awesome!
This kind of behaviour makes me really really sorry to be an Apple customer :/
Well, don't be then. I don't get this cry about walled gardens. Feel free to roam in the jungle if you don't like them.
To borrow your words - I don't get why are you criticising me when I express opinion about a one aspect of the product. OS X / Mac combination isn't just 3D - I do like other aspects of the combination that I will not get on other machines. I don't get why would you like to take away my right to express opinion about scummy Apple practices.
I really don't get why people pull this "if you don't like it, leave" argument (in everything from politics to tech). There are lots of reasons someone might want to use a mac (I do), one is perfectly entitled to complain about aspects of Apple's approach to try to make the argument for change.
Avoiding a walled garden can only happen before you invest in the garden. Once you have spent money in iTunes or the store (or e.g. even have a long list of contacts in some IM client) you are stuck unless you are happy to lose those purchases/data.
My rationale was kind of along the lines of avoiding the sunk cost fallacy: just because I'd been invested in the Apple ecosystem for 20-some years and buying iTunes stuff for more than half a decade didn't mean that I should just keep doing that when I was unhappy with other things. But that cost-benefit calculus might work out differently for other people. The lock-in is very real if you don't want to lose your stuff. It's a reason that I still refuse to buy movies from any online service. Only discs that I can rip or DRM free downloads for me from now on, so I don't end up walled-in again.
Eventually I was able to rescue all my protected music at least by paying what ammounted to a $25 ransom for a year of iTunes Match (or whatever they call it now) so I could download DRM free versions of the music I'd already paid for.
It's been a good experience except for one thing: Apple delivers no drivers for the integrated video, disables it in EFI from Bootcamp, so it runs hot and has a short battery life when not in OS X. I haven't seen anyone reporting success working around this problem, and it's been going on for years for us "switchers" to Windows.
With how much data has moved off of devices, losing data isn't a huge concern anymore. My mail, calendar, photos, etc. were already hosted elsewhere on services with cross platform support.
Cost of replacing apps is the bigger issue, and for me it worked out to something under $50. That was cheaper than the (~$200) cost premium of a 64 GB iPhone over the Z3C and a microSD card.
EDIT: If you've tied yourself into HomeKit or Apple's photo system, things would be worse. Maybe I'm atypical there?
No, the whole point for me is keeping the weeds out and have a comprehensive experience where stuff works together well.
It's 2015, there's nothing much to keep me locked in in any "walled garden".
I can use another client for my IMAP emails (or export and re-import them in 20 ways), I can move my photos out of Photos app, I use Chrome to begin with but I could very easily export Safari bookmarks too, my iTunes music files are not locked, so I can play them on Linux/Windows, etc.
What the apps? Those were always non portable between platforms, walled garden or not. And in the last 10 years, a lot of those are run on the web in the first place, or offered for free/near free anyway with the OS, or are subscriptions (e.g. the Adobe Suite, Microsoft Office 365, etc.), so I can move those about freely between OS X and say Windows.
First of all, gamers don't prefer Mac in the first place.
Second games are transient. You play them, and then you mostly forget them as new ones come out. You could jump to a new platform (that would be Windows) and buy new games and it wouldn't be a problem that your old Apple stuff doesn't work in Windows. So that's not much of a lock-in.
Third, if with the custom API they get "3D performance to match other vendors" then that's not a tempting proposition that can lock people in: it's "a match".
If, OTOH, they got performance many times that of other vendors with Metal, then that would be the GOOD kind of lock-in, the one where a platform is so much better that you use that.
Argument By Dismissal:
an idea is rejected without saying why.
Dismissals usually have overtones. For example, "If you don't like it, leave the country" implies that your cause is hopeless, or that you are unpatriotic, or that your ideas are foreign, or maybe all three. "If you don't like it, live in a Communist country" adds an emotive element.For the first time in history we have OpenGL, OpenES and WebGL on all platforms including iOS8 and IE11. And then all these companies kiss the open APIs good bye by releasing all the proprietary next-gen APIs whereas the successor to OpenGL isn't even ready. So multiplatform will have to stick with OpenGL/OpenES/WebGL or bit the granite and code for several different APIs :(
The WWDC announcements are great, don't get me wrong.
So it looks like Apple is saying goodbye to OpenGL, given that all their accelerated rendering has been moved over to Metal, at least from the keynote presentation.
[0] No sane studio ever bothered with PSGL on the PS3, the only console ever supporting an OpenGL variant.
Apple saved OpenGL from extinction when it was chosen as the iOS 3D API, as the API never had a foothold on game consoles.
Apparently now they are done with it and with no plans on adopting Vulkan.
Why adopt Vulkan given their investment in Metal, to the point that they have moved their accelerated 2D stack to Metal.
What is the point to rewrite it again for Vulkan?
Even if they adopt Vulkan, most likely would be a layer on top of Metal.
As for being in the group, Sony is also and they don't use OpenGL on their consoles.
They just moved over to Metal for AppKit operations which naturally would always be faster than a common abstraction layer.
Just look at the supported version list: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202823
Note that there's a lot of hardware on that list that supports OpenGL 4.5 and indeed has drivers for that on other platforms but on OS X all top out at 4.1. That may not sound like a big deal, but OpenGL 4.3 brought full compatibility with GLES 3.0. That's a biggie if you're, say, an indie game dev that wants to do a cross-platform game that can span from mobile to desktop. And 4.5 brings the robustness support that allows for secure WebGL.
Apple was always going to support Metal on OSX in order to allow for iOS apps to transition back. It would be stupid not to.
That doesn't necessarily mean they are abandoning OpenGL. Just seems a little early to be getting the pitchforks out.
https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2015/05/12/o...
If I were Apple the best I'd hope for is their mobile games porting over to OSX. However, with the added performance of desktop is Metal really needed? If it works on a tablet I'd say there's a fantastic chance it would work on desktop with mere OpenGL.
Developers increasingly treat iOS as a must-have platform but OS X hasn't hit that level. In particular, many games are ported but noticeably slower than the same game running on Windows. This seems like an easy way to avoid requiring a bunch of OpenGL-specific tuning which wouldn't be needed for either iOS/Metal or Windows/DirectX and will thus not be a priority for many studios.
Apple has a large and loyal customer base, and it's typically people who are willing to spend money on apps and games for their devices. Apple doesn't have to try and satisfy a bunch of legacy CAD vendors who don't care about consumer 3D graphics at all. And when Apple announces Metal, they don't mean they have a spec, they have an implementation that is going to have a significant installed base in under a year. They have a lot of advantages Khronos doesn't.
(In any case, is it yet certain that Apple won't support Vulkan on OS X? It wouldn't have been ready for El Capitan's launch this Autumn regardless. Maybe Apple will try to deprecate it (in the non-technical sense) as a compatibility option but support it anyway?)
If Apple supports Vulkan but with worse drivers than Metal, I'm not sure that's any better. OSX has roughly four times the penetration of Linux in the latest Steam hardware and software survey. I'm not sure it's worth it for most developers to deliberately target the second-best choice on OS X in order to pick up the handful of Linux gamers who can't/won't dual-boot Windows.
(EDIT: see below.)
[1] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey [2] https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2015/05/12/o...
That seems like a far fetched theory to me. AMD and NVIDIA haven't released drivers for XP for ages. Vulkan support in Source Engine is nowhere near done, if it has even started. In the meantime Chinese players will move on...
Why do I have to use those engines?
Besides, for simple games, using those engines are a huge overhead and an unnecessary cost.
I understand what you're saying, but I don't like how you make it sound a simple, already-made-for-you decision, when reality is much more nuanced. Each case is a case, and no one should turn down their critical sense when making these decisions, there are no rules.
I don't think the pricing of $0-$75/month is a huge cost. They made some big changes to their fee structure this year.
Or put differently: Simple games probably have so sleek game logic code that the engine overhead can safely be ignored.
I don't say custom engines are pointless, but for the hundreds of games that are released on the App Store daily, a ready to use engine is "enough".
My main point is still that this should be a decision that you make when starting a project, not one that has presumably been made for you. Team members expertise, project cost, for how long you'll be using the tech you're developing, etc. should all be taken into account.
A practical example: Imagine trying to optimize loading times when the whole resource system is a massive generic thing that has been made for you. Now imagine having to support a new platform. You could be in a bind simply because you're using third-party tech (especially if closed-source).
The big companies with their in-house engines will be able to pay someone to do the job.
None of which develop for Mac.
For simple games, you're probably not going to be reaching down to the Metal layer anyway. You're probably gonna stay up at the CoreGraphics layer, use SpriteKit/SceneKit, or something like Cocos or something similar.
Yes, but was my point. I just oversimplified it.
Without a big team, resources are soaked up developing the engine, as so many Gamasutra Postmortens testify.
Apple can port Metal, it makes sense: there are tons of mobile games that would pose immediate value for the platform; adding Vulkan into the mix (or even fixing their completely broken OpenGL implementation) would have been a much stronger message.