OpenGL ES v4 Library Development

News Release regarding the OpenGL-ES v4 Library is now here:

https://www.a-eon.com/PDF/News_Release_OpenGL-ES_v4_Preorder.pdf

Register your interest for preordering the OpenGL-ES v4 Library at £35 by emailing:

preorder@a-eon.co.uk

Please read the news release document above before sending an email.

Should I send a cheque, or do you take postal orders? Gonna fax my order over now

While i am all up to what Daniel do, i doubt you will have 100 copies sold, and more of it, i doubt this "Register interest / press release" old mambo-jambo is still need it in today's amiga world.

And so say truth, 3.3 version already fine enough for casual ogles2 ports and without improving drivers and warp3dnova you can't probably gain much anymore. But asking for bug-fixes for 35$ is imho too much. You should pay then beta-testers too, who find the bugs in.

And how it will be released ? One version as it now, or you will mess this out and create for each hardware separate library like you mess with RadeonHD v5 ?

And what is with latest version of radeonrx and warp3dnova, will they ever be released ?

Hello,

- it will likely be released via Updater
- Almost all of the funds raise will go to the developer Daniel
- the new lib is not platform specific.
- users have requested a new version and Daniel has agreed to do it for a discounted rate if there is the interest.

@amigakit

I also have a few questions: will this new version come with an improved and fixed version of Warp3D Nova? Since OGLES2 is a wrapper, one cannot be distributed without the other.
I tend to agree with Kas1e; I don't see the point of fixing only OGLES2 right now, as it won't result in any speed improvements over what we currently have.
And regarding those who develop games using this library—will they get this update for free? After all, it is we who keep these drivers alive; without us, they wouldn't be selling.

Thanks for your reply.

Have a good evening.

HunoPPC

@hunoPPC

There is almost zero profit in these projects

A-EON has invested tens of thousands over the years into the creation and maintenance of the OpenGL ES Library and received a fraction of the costs back.

You will get a free copy.

Sounds to me like a Great Development!

35£ VAT excluded? 42€ for France for example (so nearly 50€ which is nearly the price of the whole Enhancer Software Pack).

BTW, we are still waiting for the v2.3 version announced by Trevor himself in 2025 in the Amiga Future magazine (with new versions of War3D Nova, Warp3D SI, Warp3D CGN, Radeon RX and HD drivers, NVME and HD Audio drivers....).

If I were you, I would include the new version of OpenGLES and sell the update of the Enhancer Software Pack.

@amigakit

I'll pre-order because I want to see some progress, but this bodes extremely poorly for the future. Regular customers see a complete stall in Enhancer development and AmigaOS updates and now we're moving to a Kickstarter model for a single library that previously was part of Enhancer?!

This combined with the BS lawsuit, little developer interest these days, silence from Hyperion, and silence from A-EON on future plans is incredibly depressing. A-EON/AmigaKit seem to have completely abandoned any development for PPC and are solely focused on 68K recreations running on FPGAs with modified Linux-hosted AROS.

It feels like the death throes of AmigaOS 4 TBH.

-- eliyahu

I would like to support Daniel, but nowhere in that flyer does it mention what will be added/improved. @amigakit can you please elaborate on the plan for this new version?

If you want to support Daniel, contact him and ask him to create a new OpenGLES version from scratch via kickstarter or similar. Ask him to create a project that in the end will be released as open source and everything will be fine. He will earn more money (and it is the right choice) and we can continue to improve/fix it if he doesn't want to work anymore on the project.
This is the only solution.

@afxgroup

+1

@amigakit

I'm not a professional developer, just a hobbyist who's been putting together an AmigaOS4 port of Unreal in my spare time, but that work has had me using these libraries directly and running into real bugs along the way.

And not just in OGLES2 - the lighting driver has a bug that causes FPS to drop from ~60 to ~30 in scenes with a lot of dynamic lights, which I had to document as a known issue in my own release. I've also run into rough edges in Warp3D Nova and the graphics drivers more generally while getting this port stable. So I get why kas1e and HunoPPC are raising Warp3D Nova in the same breath as OGLES2 - in practice they're not separable when you're actually using this stack. OGLES2 sits on top of Warp3D Nova, so if the driver underneath has its own bugs or performance ceilings, polishing the wrapper on top only gets us so far.

That's really my main question too: will this new version come bundled with fixes to Warp3D Nova and the underlying gfx drivers, or is it OGLES2 only? From what I've run into just building this one project, the bugs haven't been neatly confined to one layer.
I do want to be fair to Daniel and A-EON here - maintaining this stack is real, ongoing work, and it's not like there's a huge market to spread the cost across. I'd rather see this funded and moving forward than stalled.

But I'd also like more clarity on scope before committing: what exactly is being fixed/improved, and whether Warp3D Nova is part of that scope, since that directly affects whether this addresses the bugs actual developers are dealing with day to day.

@afxgroup

Gotta agree here. I'd rather the funds go directly to Daniel rather than through an intermediary -- even as fond of Matthew as I am.

It feels like A-EON is not really interested in AmigaOS 4 development any more, and that's OK. We get that the money is in 68K, no biggie. If we're at the stage where we need bounties or KickStarters, it's not ideal, but it is what it is.

-- eliyahu

@amigakit

Interest expressed.

By the way, Mantis server seems broken. I have tried to report a NovaBridge issue twice and both times it stopped responding.

@afxgroup

I think new version from scratch organically would take too long, 3-5 years in someone's spare time.

@Capehill

You don't know what, when and if you will receive something. If I need to invest my money I prefer to have something that can be fixed by anyone. I will not waste any more money on something closed. I'm sorry but people don't understand we don't get money from trees and I'm tired to listed the same story again and again

I have withdrawn my interest in a mail.
afxgroup has good points, and it doesn't make sense that way.

@thread

I might also note that this pre-order announcement was not posted elsewhere. Not on the A-EON Twitter account, or Facebook. Not on AWN or amiga.org. In fact this seems to be the only place one would have heard about it.

Kinda strange. FWIW.

-- eliyahu

I agree with Andrea (afxgroup). At this point of the story it is a nonsense,imho, to go through all of this. The best solution for us, as final users, is to raise kickstarter campaigns to fund the developer for the project with the commitment to release it as open source. We will get, not only, new software (games, libs and whatever) but also a more united community