Jengine - OpenGL 3.3/4.x engine & JUI progress

[Traveler]

Looks pretty great! Too bad you're aiming for top of the line gfx cards only. I understand your reasoning, but you're targeting a small audience if you're planning to make a game with this engine eventually.

[phibermon]

You are quite right, my reasoning doesn't make for a sound design decision in the present day but :

there will come a day when it's no longer a problem

I want to make an MMORPG so by the time I've finished? all this may very well be old news

I secretly harbor the desire to get lots of developers on board and perhaps open up GL2.x/ES code paths (ok, so not so secret now)

[WILL]

I wonder how compatible this might be on say iOS? Not to sound redundant, but it's the way a lot of developers are going these days.

[Traveler]

I believe iOS still uses GL2.x/ES

[phibermon]

I'm afraid that IOS doesn't interest me enough at the moment. There can be no doubt that IOS with it's staggering user-base is attracting a large number of developers but that's not where the cutting edge of graphics are and that's where I would like to be personally.

If anything IOS is a huge step backwards for developers in terms of GPU technology.

While the mobile platforms have performance characteristics that are very impressive for their size and power footprint, compared to the high end PC spectrum and indeed the soon to be released, next generation consoles?

The IPad 2 for instance, with it's out-of-order, dual core 1gz A9 Cortex chip and PowerVR GPU would barely hold it's own against average gaming PC's of 8 years ago (especially given that the small cache that normally accompanies the A9 implementations; 'ghz to ghz' comparisons against desktop CPUs of similar frequencies are woefully ill-founded)

I feel there's work to be done on the Object Pascal front, targetting the newer versions of OpenGL.

And assuming I continue to work alone? I should be finished right about the time that mobile devices see the next generation of OpenGL ES

My reasoning would be this : major companies have bought into ES fully; Apple, Samsung, Sony etc. They're all now bound to OpenGL (somthing that I bet microsoft is regretting given they've had plenty of opportunity to cross platform DirectX )

When the next itteration of ES comes, that'll be what these companies use and it will almost certainly be a sub-set of GL4.0 or some future version. Khronos will not further diverge ES away from the mainline GL versions, if anything they'll aim to merge again.

But I digress.

Really it's because I want to, I'm not interested in 'following the money' or even targeting the largest audience. If that was my goal I'd be coding in C/C++

[code_glitch]

Ah but on iPad 2 its supposed to be '9x faster' than 'iPad 1' which is 'faster' than iPhone which is 'faster' than... well you get the idea. Overall, looking pretty good. Looks like some very nice performance there (455fps). What card is this running on? My HD4330 only has OpenGl 3.2 so I'm at a loss there, and most GMA cards come with 2.1 or somewhere in that ballpark. And the newest sandy bridge 'cards' shipping on o7s etc only sport OpenGl 3.1/3.2. Unfortunately, i7 is 'the future' according to intel, so yes I agree it will not be an issue with gamers that have a GTX460 (or even casual people like me that buy a mid range discrete card, no debates please, I get >30fps out of almost everything on med settings, will just be on that bandwagon). Just don't make the game too popular k? lol. You might end up getting intel to make real graphic chips one day.

Anyways, I get what you're saying in a sense: if no one uses the latest technology, then why is it there in the first place and why make new things right? Shame no one likes the word 'new'. In programming new = crash, bugs, trouble and more trouble so I can understand some of the reasons. But OGL 1.5 on windows 7 platforms? come on...

[Carver413]

I have to agree with phibermon, it is not very wise to build a new engine on old code.