So whatever happened to the whole PGDCE thing?

[phibermon]

Yes, I'm aware. I think it would make far more sense for them to move to OpenGL 4+ than Vulkan, though... OpenGL 4 would give them all the performance they'd ever need while still remaining somewhat accessible to the sort of user who wants to add their own rendering code to an application. Almost nobody "needs" Vulkan, and the learning curve for Vulkan has proven itself to be steep enough that even professional studios staffed with industry veterans are making mistakes with their initial Vulkan ports (IE: almost nobody knows HOW to use Vulkan.)

By the way, as a general note regarding Pascal-based game development tools, I've been working on fixing (and later improving) the Lazarus port of DeleD since this past June... currently in the process of rewriting all the rendering code. (There's a post on the Lazarus forums I made that goes into more details, if anyone's interested.) Here's a couple screenshots of what it's looking like so far. Keep an eye out!

https://i.imgur.com/7iVT1Pw.png
https://i.imgur.com/7GEjy1B.png

I think GL4 would be a more useful target too - there will likely never be vulkan support on OSX (Apple have their own API - Metal) and there's no indication that we'll see Vulkan on mobile devices in its current form or a 'cut down' version like GLES is to OpenGL. The general setup of Vulkan is like GL4 but designed around low level access to memory and the GPU - specifically when it comes to asynchronous access from multiple threads - IE with DirectX12 / Vulkan / Metal you can set it up to be handling some shader heavy transform feedback functionality while doing fixed pipeline heavy stuff like rendering shadow maps - you need a very specific and sophisticated design to even be able to take advantage of this - GLScene is NOT that - Vulkan is only faster if you make use of such things - if you don't? it's just a more difficult OpenGL4.5.

Vulkan doesn't replace OpenGL either - there will be new OpenGL versions etc - I myself have been planning around Vulkan since I learned some use cases and there's some areas where I *can* take advantage of it but not many - maybe in a year or two when it's better understood and professionals open up more about usage patterns I'll be able to identify more areas I can use it and it'll become beneficial to implement.

For now I'm all about optimizations involving OpenCL compute - that'll keep me more than busy enough lol

--

Good! DeleD was a promising project and I was really surprised that development seemed to stop - it's looking great and I look forward to seeing new developments!