Because OpenGL had been around for a long time and supported by so many different platforms, she said, it was a technology that developers could rely on and plan around.
'A problem with game development is projects can be very long and teams are often in a financially perilous situation,' Andi McClure, an independent game developer and the founder of Mermaid Heavy Industries, told me in an online chat. If you're an indie dev making a game that you'd like to release on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android, you can do the work once by using OpenGL and know that your game will work correctly on those platforms.Īt least, that was the case until yesterday. This is especially important for independent developers with limited time and resources. OpenGL, though, is open-source and cross-platform compatible. It basically does the same job as DirectX for Microsoft programs. Put simply, OpenGL is a middleman that takes instructions from a program and tells a graphics card what to do with it.
It wasn't the most attention-grabbing news of the day for most people, but for indie game developers it caused immediate alarm.
