Valve Bootstrapped Source 2 Engine On an Open-Source Vulkan Driver 60
An anonymous reader writes A new article out details how Valve bootstrapped their VULKAN back-end with the Source 2 Engine over a period of just four months thanks to relying on an open-source driver. With designing for the open-source Intel Vulkan Linux driver developed by LunarG, Valve developers were quickly able to resolve issues and progress the driver in a turn-key manner. This Intel Linux driver will be released as open-source once the Khronos VULKAN specification has been published.
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Hudsucker like a motherfucker.
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Should sexist opensource developers have their projects censored or removed?
Alternative question: when there are hundreds of opensource developers out there, what criteria do you suggest should be given publicity?
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I believe what they're saying is that in this case they're able to troubleshoot issues from both the driver perspective and the game engine perspective. In the past you could only work with one or the other, and any problems found were harder to resolve because at the end of the day you had only a very narrow understanding of what the other is doing at the particular moment when the problem occurred.
Removing anuses from MMOs (Score:1)
good f'ing luck getting ahead of the RMT mofo's that plague and destroy online games
Have you ever seriously considered not playing games with assholes?
"RMT" (real money trading) is a term used in MMO (massively multiplayer online) games, which put thousands of players or more. So if an anus is playing at all, he is playing with you, in the same virtual economy even if not directly. How can anuses be removed efficiently from such an environment without violating some countries' implied warranty statutes? Or did you mean give up MMO games entirely?
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"there's an open source driver that's not compatible with opengl for intels new gpu so that the intel gpu can now run a game described as RETRO by the ceo of one of the companies".
something like that. who cares. intels gpu's still are so crap that you can make headlines of playing a 10 year old game on them, just like their gpu's were crappy 10 years ago in similar fashion.
Re:Wut? (Score:4, Informative)
I work for one of the companies mentioned in the summary and I still have no clue what it means.
And I have to say, those floors are looking spotless.
Even if you've been under a rock, so you don't know what either Khronos or Vulkan are, you should still be able to use google and Wikipedia. If not, you are probably not part of the Slashdot audience.
Open Source Source 2 (Score:1)
Open source is neat, huh? Sure, would be nice if Source 2 were, you know, open source.
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Self righteous? I'm not advocating anything. Unlike you I don't give a fuck if someone is making bucket loads of money because I'm not a jealous prick.
If you have an issue with companies making profit from open source you can replace valve with google, microsoft, apple, facebook etc because valve does far more for open source than any of the others do.
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Uhhh, you realise that it was Valve who wrote the open source Vulcan driver, right?
They're making a shit ton of profit of code they wrote, and happened to be kind enough to open source for you to use.
That, and, if you open source something, you made a conscious decision to allow someone else to use that code, and to make a profit off it. At that point, they have no responsibility to you at all. It was your choice to take your code and open it. It was very nice of you to do that, but you are not buying so
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Open source is neat, huh? Sure, would be nice if Source 2 were, you know, open source.
Sure, and it would be nice if it was Christmas every day.
But...tadadadattataa! Tim Sweeney to the rescue! Unreal Engine 4 is fully open source if you really need an engine that you can modify all the way down to the hardware abstraction layers.
Bootstrapped (Score:3, Insightful)
That word does not mean what you think it means.
Valve developers were quickly able to resolve issues and progress the driver in a turn-key manner.
Oh I see, we're playing bullshit bingo. In that case, as you were...
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Turn-key solution - it just goes out of the box, no effort required. Turn key, go.
In this context it means bugger all. In fact it's a nonsense; I can't make a meaningful statement out of that no matter how I try to mangle the term.
Buzzword much? Perhaps post should be deleted? (Score:1)
Star Trek fan wonders... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is the Vukan-based driver have a spec named for the Klingon homeworld?
Khitomer Accords (Score:2)
Aren't the Vulcans and Klingons working together by TNG anyway? The peace talks that led to a peace treaty between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire [memory-alpha.org] were in fact started by a half-Vulcan (Capt. Spock) and a Klingon (Chancellor Gorkon).
No thanks (Score:1)
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No, it absolutely does come from designing the API differently.
The key conceptual difference is that in OpenGL, you change state, change state, change state, change state, render, change state, change state, change state, change state, change state, change state, render. You do this every render loop.
In {Vulcan | Direct3D 12 | Metal | Mantle}, you define two states at program launch, then each render loop, you do: bind existing state, render, bind existing state, render.
There's two gains here
1) A small one
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It doesn't meant that code to render million triangles will have 600 million lines. It is just a constant overhead to deal with various device trickery (multiple GPUs, multiple monitors, full screen versus window, etc etc). There will be 3rd party libraries immediately which will allow you to do 'render things on default screen, with default resolution, on default graphic card, not using SLI, using default malloc for memory allocation' with single function call, reducing line count drastically (but still pr
What's glibc? (Score:2)
Vulkan is API for game engine programmers, not for game developers. It is a lot closer to kernel API than to libc API if you want to compare with normal programming.
In this analogy that compares libc to a game engine, what's the counterpart to GNU C Library (glibc), a free implementation of libc?
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Nothing yet, because Vulkan is not yet public, so no 'free' implementations exist. But I'm quite sure that as soon as it appears, projects like Ogre3D or openscenegraph will provide their bindings over Vulkan.
This analogy is flawed in some respect - because glibc is a drop in replacement for libc. There is no such agreement on higher level API in this case, but rather competing APIs/engines.
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You may not think it's a good idea, but every single game engine developer on the planet thinks it's a great idea ;).
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Well, you're getting too excited about something that is evolutionary step backward and such hasty statements are a proof of this. I myself have some opengl experience and I can tell you getting to lower level is NOT what I would want. Yet I don't want to be locked into using an engine either with their often suspect design decisions. I consider opengl to be in sweet spot in this regard, though shaders are kinda pushing it.
So what you're saying is basically "I want I high level API for drawing graphics reasonably fast". That's fine, you should go grab an engine. There are plenty of very high quality ones out there, many of which are free (at least until you start making money). There are also plenty of mid-level ones that will not cause you to have significant lock in.
However, the person writing said engine for a AAA game, or an app that involves 3D rendering and that has to conserve battery life as much as possible while
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No, they're not at all obsolete in the 21st Century.
When it comes to graphics programming, at the very low level (i.e. people who are writing the engines, not people who are using the engines), everything is about performance. These people (myself included) absolutely will jump through the hoops of writing 600 lines of setup code if it means I don't end up with half a CPU used up just recompiling shaders and verifying state changes all the time.
Ultimately, this code is written once, by the rendering engine
So this is what they're doing instead of.... (Score:1)