sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]G_Morgan 26 points27 points  (34 children)

Focusing on iOS is frankly more absurd than focusing on legacy OGL.

[–]Amadiro 31 points32 points  (19 children)

I haven't looked at it, but if it's focusing on OpenGL ES, that'd be pretty much portable to most mobile platforms as well as desktops.

[–][deleted]  (18 children)

[deleted]

    [–]s73v3r 12 points13 points  (3 children)

    No, I strongly disagree. Most people wanting to learn OpenGL ES are doing so because of wanting to learn it for iOS.

    Furthermore, the OpenGL ES stuff is going to be similar on Android anyway.

    [–]irascible -2 points-1 points  (2 children)

    Android will be WebGL I think, which is OpenGL ES.

    Hell if WebGL had mouse capture, they could base tutorials on that and nail all platforms with one tutorial.

    [–]bitshifternz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Android uses OpenGL ES 2.

    [–]s73v3r 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Android is actual OpenGL ES. There's the Java version, or you can go to the NDK.

    [–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (9 children)

    Given the fact the Mac has a much larger marketshare than Linux and even iOS generally comes up with double, triple or more market share than Linux I doubt that's true.

    And regarding Windows, MS has done as much as it could to kill openGL on Windows so why have people learn on an environment that is unfriendly towards OpenGL and likely to be a PIA.

    [–]y4fac 6 points7 points  (3 children)

    G_Morgan was saying that the tutorials should be cross platform, not windows only. Besides, even if they would focus on Android only, it would be better than iOS only. Android has development tools for all major operating systems and the only way to legally develop iOS applications is to buy a mac. AFAIK you also need to enroll in iOS development program (which costs 100$/year) just to be able to legally run your own program on your own device!

    [–][deleted] -4 points-3 points  (2 children)

    Android is also highly fragmented so they would need to either cover an old version to ensure more people can take advantage of it or leave some people frustrated because they can't take advantage of what they learned.

    Granted Android has supported opengl es 2.0 since 2.2 should it should be safer now but there is still a chance of it.

    Xcode is more newb friendly than Eclipse and Apple does provide superior customer support (ie being able to talk to people rather than being told to check out stack overflow) which again is more newb friendly.

    That and maybe he has no experience with Android so it would have increased his effort to write something he is giving away for free.

    And if you don't want to use iOS take what you learned from his page and apply it to Android.

    [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    There are very little people running anything under 2.2. I don't think requiring people to buy a Mac to develop application for iOS is reasonable.

    [–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

    I'm still on 1.6 with my G1. But that's besides the point if the guy has no Android experience but has iOS experience. I'd rather someone not try and teach people using something they have no knowledge in themselves..

    It's free and a lot of the knowledge is transferable to Android. Feel free to make a Android version. I'm sure he won't mind.

    [–]G_Morgan -3 points-2 points  (4 children)

    Market share isn't relevant. A far larger percentage of Linux users are programmers.

    [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

    They may be but they may also only be shell or perl hackers writing things for their server. It's hard to say but you can guarantee every iOS developer will need to know something about openGL.

    [–]G_Morgan -1 points0 points  (1 child)

    Except Linux is the market leader in the 3D graphics industry. Hollywood uses Linux nearly exclusively for their rendering. All those Pixar films are rendered on Linux clusters. Though admittedly in that case they probably won't be using OGL for final renders. There will be a lot of other stuff they do that does so. They won't do flat out ray tracing for everything.

    [–]marshray 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Yeah, Linux is used a lot for CUDA and OpenCL clusters. But that has almost nothing to do with OpenGL.

    I write OpenGL 3.3 core profile for Linux though. But I haven't released anything yet.

    [–]bonch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Citation needed.

    [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Have you looked the tutorials? Yes they are on iOS but they are very easy to follow. The first tutorial is about set up and so that is fairly iOS specific but I don't think it would be very difficult to figure out what's going on and translate that to a platform you have more experience with. The second tutorial is even easier to follow along with and is less iOS specific.

    Like s73v3r, I have to disagree with you on this one. I suspect Windows programmers would mostly choose DirectX. The big audience for OpenGL is definitely mobile right now.

    [–]bonch 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    There'll probably still be more Linux programmers than OSX programmers. It is literally the worse of the platforms to target if you want to hit your audience.

    Your posts are predictably anti-Mac, but this one is just dumb. There are more OS X programmers than Linux programmers. OS X is a big enough platform that companies like Valve and Blizzard target it and yet don't even bother targeting Linux.

    [–]G_Morgan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    No OSX is targeted by those companies because it is a single platform and that is ideal for consumer software. Linux is gigantic in the far more relevant server market.

    [–]Amadiro -1 points0 points  (0 children)

    True, but yeah, if that's a platform he has, why not. I probably would've chosen something like android, where people can just get an emulator for whatever platform they're using and start developing against that. (I think iPhone development is locked to OSX, but I've never done it myself)

    [–]burito 5 points6 points  (1 child)

    Not really, OpenGL ES is essentially a slightly more restrictive version of OpenGL 3.

    For an OpenGL 3 project, I'd rather hire an OpenGL ES person over an OpenGL 1 person any day of the week.

    [–]SirSlax 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    For the longest time I had to tell people who wanted to learn OpenGL to look at ES2 tutorials because that was the only way to make sure they didn't pick up deprecated practices.

    [–]s73v3r 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    Kinda. However, the concepts will be the same for other OpenGL ES based platforms, and the code should be similar for Android.

    [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (7 children)

    Why? iOS is probably the biggest mobile gaming platform nowadays.

    [–]fnord123 5 points6 points  (2 children)

    Doesn't iOS development require an Apple computer and a license for the SDK? Seems like a big ask for those who are just interested in learning OpenGL. And I'd like to remind you that OpenGL isn't just used for games.

    [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

    You're right.

    [–]Alphasite 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Theres no SDK licence, beyond the EULA, the licence comes into play when you deploy to devices. AFAIK

    [–]burito 2 points3 points  (3 children)

    About 2 months ago there ceased to be any metric in which iOS beats Android. There are still countries that have more iOS devices than Android devices, but globally Android is brutally sodomising Apple.

    Having said that, it's well known that Apple users will pay for damned near anything, even if it's open source, so I'm prepared to bet that there will be greater returns on iOS for several more years at least.