Until now the default version of Oort has been OpenGL and 64bit on Windows. In the next version we are changing the default to be the DirectX 11 version and plan to remove the OpenGL and 32bit version to allow us to focus on the improving the DirectX version.
We have added support for DirectX 10 class hardware and we are working on a couple of remaining issues before the release.
That sounds like good news to me! (I’m sure the OpenGL partisans will be a little bit sad, though. Won’t that obviate any sort of Linux release?)
The Mac version still uses OpenGL so support will remain in the engine. Its more about focusing effort - there are different bugs and performance issues between OpenGL and DX as well as Nvidia v AMD v Intel.
Puzzling, really. I thought the whole point of OpenGL and DX was to smooth out those differences. (He said, facing a day of sorting out C++ 11 feature support in different compilers.)
I’ve got my fingers crossed for a Thursday release! I want to binge play all the new features as soon as they come online.
Well, but players with Win32 cannot play after this. Isn’t it?
It’s been difficult to buy a computer with a 32-bit processor for a few years now. A modern voxel-based game needs 64-bits of addressing space because the range available under 32-bits guarantees a lot of virtual memory use.
But yeah, the legacy 32-bit systems will not be playing. (Nor will people running 32-bit Windows on a 64-bit processor.)
Do you mean no more OpenGL on Windows, or a focus only on Windows and DirectX 11 (ie. no WebGL, no Linux)?
A little bit more detail on the supported platforms and future plans.
The following builds and platforms are currently accessible.
Today:
For the next release we’ll only publish the following configurations. All the other versions will be dropped.
Next Release:
In the future we plan to support the following.
Future Release:
We’ll announce these additional build changes as soon as they’re ready.
The goal is to only have DirectX 11 to allow us to get the best out of it. While it would be great if the same changes made the OpenGL and DirectX version better this is not always the case and testing/fixing/optimising for both takes more time that can be spent else where to make the game better.
There are some Win32 OSs with 64bit CPUs and Microsoft offers a 64bit Windows 10 upgrade path from Windows 32bit versions but it requires a clean install and you’d have to see if it make sense for you. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wiki/windows_10-win_upgrade/how-to-switch-from-32-bit-versions-of-windows-to/40d90c4e-8845-4bcb-bb2f-aeab312caf74.
Any plans for Vulkan?
Definitely something we’ll checkout and explore in the future.
I guess targeting DirectX 12 would limit players to running on WIndows 10? Any plans to create a Win10 DX12 version? I supposed the refactoring involved would be significant, huh?
Again something to checkout in the future. We want to get the most out of the available hardware - so it’s definitely something we’ll explore.
Any idea when Mac will get 64 bit?
Next release will have 64bit Mac support.
(We didn’t release the 64bit OS X version earlier, because the 32bit version seemed to be pretty stable. Unlike the Windows version which consistently hit memory issues. Either way - it’ll be out soon. Think the target is next week.)
The default Windows build is the 64 bit DirectX 11 config. So everyone gets it by default.
You can access the browser version here. However, I wouldn’t encourage it over the native version - it’s slower and more memory hungry.
I thought today its Windows 64bit OpenGL, because i can not participate in any beta :S