VULKAN, METAL, UNREAL, UNITY
Hi all. Just a few words on these four key terms.
VULKAN is a completely new open standard for graphics, brought by the same group in charge of the OpenGL standard. They had to do a new standard that wasn’t backwards compatible with OpenGL in order to achieve substantial performance gains. The PC game industry is slowly switching to this new standard, and the performance improvements are out of the question.
As most of us iOS developers know, Apple will not support OpenGL from iOS 13 onwards. As others have said, they want everybody to use their Metal API (which is their “equivalent” of the open VULKAN standard). WE iOS DEVELOPERS WERE/ARE PRETTY NERVOUS AB0UT THIS, and brought this up in the forum a few times before. I really hope that AppGameKit S will address this concern. In their letter, I see that TGC will by using a “wrapper” that will effectively allow the use of VULKAN as if it were Apple’s METAL API. I have said this before and will say it again: I would be more than happy to pay for an upgrade that ensures my existing code will keep working with the new iOS requierements. That is, I will be more than happy to pay to have compatibility with Apple’s METAL standard. In this sense, the METAL ‘upgrade’ is more urgent than the VULKAN one, because it will leave iOS OpenGL developers out. I urge TGC to make sure that we will be taken care of. I’ll happily buy the Studio upgrade. And I really hope it solves this issue.
Now a few words on Unreal, Unity, C++, Tier 2, etc.
First of all, Unreal has become the de-facto leader on 3D game development (yes they are the makers of Fortnite) and THEY USE C++. I emphasize this, for all of those 3D developers out there. C++ IS the standard for 3D, and other top engines require C++ as well. The story is very different for us 2D developers, Unreal sucks for 2D, and Unity seems to keep the crown in this niche (some of the most successful 2D titles for mobile have been written with Unity, for example “Where is my water?”). UNITY USES C#. I’ve tried Unity before, and it sucks. Sure, the C#/script approach seems/is more friendly/faster to implement, but it is very constraining. A close contender of Unity is Cocos (Angry birds was written in Cocos). But Cocos is an open standard that is all over the place. If you think AppGameKit TIER 2 is unfriendly, forget about Cocos.
In my opinion, AGK’ Tier 2 is a far superior 2D mobile engine. It gives you far more freedom than any other 2D mobile engine. Is it more work to program in C++? If you are starting out, for sure. But if you program in C++ you will find that as soon as your main classes are written, you will be able to use them again and again and again in your next games/game levels, saving you an enormous amount of time. Not only that, you will be able to use them in completely different settings. Plus, the performance is, in my experience, far better. It is only then that you will realize the power of Tier 2. If you like programming 2D mobile games in C#, than you should look into Unity. But for all of us that have invested a lot of time with the existing C++ framework, we love AppGameKit and hope to be taken care of.
Keep it up TGC! And congrats for your Apple award!!!
AppGameKit 2018.10.10
iMac Book Pro, MacOS 10.14, Xcode 9.4.1;
iPhone 6, iOS 12; iPad (3rd gen), iOS 9.35; iPad Pro 12'9 (2nd gen), iOS 12.
Dell Precision T7400, Windows 7 Professional 64bit, Visual Studio Community 2017;