Has anyone started playing around with Apple Metal yet? Have you found any good books on this subject. I’ve found one I’m thinking of getting, “Metal Programming Guide” by Janie Clayton - has anyone read that?
It’s a little scary moving away from OpenGL as that is the backbone of a lot of what I do but I’m trying to embrace this change gracefully so any advice would be appreciated.
[ignorance warning!] Why would this affect Corona users when we use the Corona APIs? Unless writing faders requires knowledge of the underlying graphics layer? (I no longer know C.) However, is moving away from OpenGL a requirement or only an option?
I also trust that Corona will come up with solutions but since Apple will now be using Metal as it’s graphics language I’m unclear how this will effect my use of advanced graphics. I imagine my custom shaders build in OpenGL will no longer function on iOS unless Metal provides some kind on conversion API which, knowing Apple, will be unlikely as they will want people to use only Metal to get the full performance benefits.
Also with visuals, little nuances in the choice of how to handle a situation can produce varied results. For example, in Photoshop you could adjust the levels of an image, sharpen the image and then adjust its red channel color curve but the results could be very different it you rearrange the order of those adjustments. At some point in OpenGL somebody made decisions about how to achieve a particular graphics effect and made choices about the order of visual operations and the mathematics behind them and that was influenced by reality of the contemporary hardware. With a complete “reinvention” of a graphics language with a less limited set of hardware constraints I’m uncertain that porting my current graphics modules will be successful without a complete rewrite for Metal.
I imagine some things like normal mapping with remain similar but I still feel a general sense of apprehension. . . I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
Rob, can’t we ban this bot account? It just seems to respond to random old posts with random chunks of text.
Done
Nice one 
[ignorance warning!] Why would this affect Corona users when we use the Corona APIs? Unless writing faders requires knowledge of the underlying graphics layer? (I no longer know C.) However, is moving away from OpenGL a requirement or only an option?
I also trust that Corona will come up with solutions but since Apple will now be using Metal as it’s graphics language I’m unclear how this will effect my use of advanced graphics. I imagine my custom shaders build in OpenGL will no longer function on iOS unless Metal provides some kind on conversion API which, knowing Apple, will be unlikely as they will want people to use only Metal to get the full performance benefits.
Also with visuals, little nuances in the choice of how to handle a situation can produce varied results. For example, in Photoshop you could adjust the levels of an image, sharpen the image and then adjust its red channel color curve but the results could be very different it you rearrange the order of those adjustments. At some point in OpenGL somebody made decisions about how to achieve a particular graphics effect and made choices about the order of visual operations and the mathematics behind them and that was influenced by reality of the contemporary hardware. With a complete “reinvention” of a graphics language with a less limited set of hardware constraints I’m uncertain that porting my current graphics modules will be successful without a complete rewrite for Metal.
I imagine some things like normal mapping with remain similar but I still feel a general sense of apprehension. . . I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
Rob, can’t we ban this bot account? It just seems to respond to random old posts with random chunks of text.
Done
Nice one