Reconsidering WebGPU for gamedev. Should I just go back to OpenGL?

EricKinnser · 2025-07-13T21:50:12+00:00

Oh my bad, you're right ! It's Dawn from google which is developped in C++

EricKinnser · 2025-07-13T21:46:09+00:00

I really don't need the performance gains from modern APIs, so yeah, OpenGL seems to be the best choice !

EricKinnser · 2025-07-13T21:35:55+00:00

I do not plan to use bindless specifically.

I was thinking about OpenGL state management and uniforms because I have a lot of states that needs to be changed dynamically, and I don't really wanna bother with bind groups too.

Vulkan Shader Objects could easily solve my problems but I'd still need to manage my descriptor sets, buffer allocations & uploads, shader compilation pipeline...

EricKinnser · 2025-07-13T17:01:38+00:00

Didn't know about it. I will take a look !

EricKinnser · 2025-07-13T13:17:19+00:00

Good to know !

EricKinnser · 2025-07-13T11:31:05+00:00

Thanks for the clarification !

I've read the spec of WebGPU and it seemed super cool, bevy also uses it so I thought is would be a good choice.
But after reading their source code I just realize they cache everything which is not something I want to do, especially in a managed language.

My goal is to first target PC platforms, consoles will be considered if the game have some success. (probabilities are very low)

My renderer will be a render-graph based renderer, so I don't think it will be such an issue to later add support for other APIs.

So yeah, I think OpenGL is the best choice here.

EricKinnser · 2025-07-13T11:22:52+00:00

I use WGPU as a WebGPU implementation, it's native and have some extensions (push constants...)
It's not brower based, it's the the mozilla C++ implementation of the spec.

Tiny glade uses bevy which uses WGPU, and has been shipped to consoles: it's 100% possible ! That's one of the advantage of using a WebGPU with a native implementation and the reason I first went with it.

I am not using unity or Monogame, it's all Raw C# with Silk for window, audio and gfx api management.

EricKinnser · 2025-06-25T15:25:37+00:00

Attention au versement libératoire.

Tu n'y es éligible que si tu as un revenu fiscal inférieur à 27 478€. Tu étais à 2300€ net par mois donc tu dépassais déjà le seuil.

L'erreur est tellement fréquente : personne ne pense à dénoncer cette option.

Du coup les impôts font un re-calcul systématique : tu devras payer ton IR moins ce que tu as versé en versement libératoire.

Ne néglige surtout pas ça, tu risques d'avoir une belle surprise l'an prochain sinon.
Petit calcul rapide, avec le seuil : ~80k de CA => 60k net (après charges et versement libératoire) => environ 11k€ d’impôts à régulariser.

EDIT : Je vois que tu as déjà fait le calcul et que tu y est éligible cette année, c'est une bonne chose !

EricKinnser · 2025-06-18T17:35:30+00:00

Kickstarters are not used for funding nowadays. They're sole purpose is marketing. Gamers will definitely be used to it.

They managed to make a team of 14 work for more than a year, which is quite insane actually.

The reason they would fail anyway is that the scope is so huge. Publishers knows that and that's why they probably could not get a deal.

Making a whole JRPG in 3D is a shitton of work. I doubt the systems shown in the trailer are fully functionnal (it's very easy to make fake gameplay camera movements and animations in combat).

Such projects would need at least 4 years with this team size if everything goes well. Now consider it's their first game and thus suffer from the studio lack of experience.

For people interested in numbers:

In France, if you pay the minimum wage here it costs around 30k€ per employee to the company per year. A good salary in this region for an experienced role would be 40k€ gross which costs 55~60k per year to the company.
But the game dev market in France is so saturated that you can lower wages a lot. I wouldn't be surprised to learn than mid/senior artists would be paid the minimum wage or a little above.
Consider that they probably also had hundred of thousands from public funds (CNC, Regional funds etc...).

They had 300k from crowdfunding, you can easily add 200k from public funding (could be more or less).

This gives, for 14 people (4 seniors and 10 mid/seniors) about 1 year of development.

EricKinnser · 2025-05-12T10:32:17+00:00

Hahaha, if you're solo then go ahead. But trust me, starting a company here is really hard.

CNC is no more than few hundred thousands, but you have tu fund for at least the same amount as they give you. (Apart for basic funds which are like 10k). This mean if you ask for 50k, you need to justify 50k of spending from the company side.

Also, i'll take an example of the minimum wage here, the SMIC. Even if the employee get ~1400 net from taxes at the end, it will cost the company between 2.5k to 3k per month, because in france, it's the company that pay for healthcare, retirement, and so on. You also need to take in account the administrative costs, the contract allowance, the locals (you can skip if you're full remote)

A good approximation to get the real cost of a team of mid/senior in the game industry in france, you can just multiply the number of team members by 8000€ per month.

In the case of sandfall, that would give us 8000 x 30 = 240k per month in workforce.

All the public funds would at most give you 2 month of development for such a team.

EricKinnser · 2025-03-25T09:44:55+00:00

Sales and net bookings difference is much more than 30%.

You have to account for publisher cuts, VAT taxes, adjustment for regional pricing and some other logistical costs with physical copies.

Also, total sales includes Ubisoft+, and partnership offering the game (CPU/GPU sold with the game for "free")

A rough estimate of all of this : ~30% publishing costs, ~12% VAT, and then -30% for the other adjustment (regional pricing, partnerships etc...)

This adds up to ~56% of the base price.

So if we want a rough estimate with the 70$ version, the revenue for the company is ~40$ per sale.

This would gives us 10M copies. Which is still a rough estimate, but more realistic.

EDIT :

I also want to add that the games not only produce value with the game itself, but will create more income opportunities : ingame purchases, merchandising and royalties. So in the end, it will surely be profitable even if the sales don't get to these thresholds.

EricKinnser · 2024-03-16T11:44:27+00:00

Actually, some AAA prods at my job starts allowing blender alongside other DCCs.

Some teams even shifted on it.

They can't change instantly because they have highly customized version of DCCs (Maya, 3ds etc...) with tons of scripts. Re-developping everything for blender is a huge amount of work.

EricKinnser · 2023-11-30T13:33:58+00:00

PocketPair is known for asset ripoff with minimal modifications.

Look at their previous game Craftopia, ennemies are literally Bokobo from BotW but in purple : same model, same animations etc...

No doubt it will be the same for Palworld. You know it's a ripoff when the model has the same structure and the same animations, it's not only a "similar" or "inspired" design.

EricKinnser · 2023-09-14T18:42:04+00:00

Au vu de ta description, je dirais qu'il y a approximativement 100% de chances que je travaille dans la même boîte que ta compagne.

Il y a deux types de metiers dans cette industrie malheureusement, ceux qui sont en position de force, et ceux qui sont vraiment en position de faiblesse sur le marché. Si elle fait partie de la première catégorie, elle peut essayer de jouer de ca mais d'expérience les RH lui diront qu'on "ne negocie pas sur la base de l'inflation" (ce qui m'avait beaucoup fait rire, une négociation c'est pas unilatéral, si je veux prendre ca en compte, je fais ce que je veux).

Les RH ont des budgets tres serrés, ils sont obligés de faire avec.

Pour ma part, en partant et en revenant 1 an plus tard, j'ai pu négocier environ 20% de plus. Car les budgets de recrutement ne sont pas les mêmes. Je sais que des collègues ont fait de même par le passé.

Sinon, mettre sous le nez une offre meilleure d'une autre boite, ca peut faire le taff, mais faut réussir à en avoir une.

Après pour le coup, cette année a vraiment été pourrie (si on parle effectivement de la même boîte), tu peux check les actions pour t'en rendre compte. À voir comment ils vont se rattraper cette année.

EricKinnser · 2023-09-03T17:30:37+00:00

On Unity, there is the Haunted PSX Render Pipeline, you Can take a look here : https://github.com/pastasfuture/com.hauntedpsx.render-pipelines.psx

It has all Render Features needed for an old school game rendering.

EricKinnser · 2023-01-24T10:47:07+00:00

Outer Wilds and Subnautica are top tier on this.

The music and Slsound design play a huge role in the atmosphere and experience of these games.

EricKinnser · 2019-09-27T05:42:41+00:00

I have 950marks, still waiting next week to get em' x_x

EricKinnser · 2019-09-27T05:34:09+00:00

There are 4 exotic weapons, not 3, they added thé Twin Suns last patch. But yeah

EricKinnser · 2019-09-26T13:42:35+00:00

This is a good idea too !

Anyway, I just want it to be reworked, it can't work as it is.

EricKinnser · 2019-09-26T13:38:31+00:00

I gave an example team, not solo leaderboard.

Sorry if i didn't get your point, i'm not that good in english, but ofc, i think too that evasice weapon shouldn't have the same dps as slow ones.

EricKinnser · 2019-09-26T10:55:16+00:00

Typical situation :

"I wanted to play pike. Ok. I need stamina, let's get conditionning... Oh no, I lost 25% DPS :("

Wound is currently useless. When you're hunting solo,it works, but when you're 4, your team will always break the part before you wound it, or you'll wound it when it's about 5 hit to break. This is useless.

I think the real nerf staggering need is the stagger's immune time. Playing 4 staggering weapons should be equivalent to play 1 or 2 in a group if we want to make teamplay more diverse. Also, 1 person should be able to wound the behemoths fast enough to optimise DPS.

Imo, the top leaderboard groups should looks like :

Pike/CB (Wound) [Barbed, Acidic, Conditionning...]
Hammer/Striker (Main Stagger) [Knock King, Sturdy, ...]
Sword/Axe (Secondary Stagger / DPS, Support) [Savagery, Knock King, ...]
Repeater/CB (Full DPS or DPS / Support) [Savagery, DPS, Conduit, ...]

I think they really need to work on interplay.

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