Speed boat simulator in development
 

Hi, folks. I hope you'll forgive the non-offshore boating nature of my first post here. I'm developing a speed boat simulator that some people here might find interesting:

http://www.performancesimulations.co...oat-simulator/

There's no demo yet. Hopefully in the next few months I'll have something people with a decent gaming rig can try for free and buy at a reasonable price.

I'd love to get some feedback from you guys. Let me know what you think, you might even influence how it develops! Feel free to leave comments and questions in this thread or on the web site itself. If there's no interest in smaller speed boats here, let me know and I'll move along to calmer waters. :D

Mods: If this isn't the right forum for this, let me know and I'll delete and repost this somewhere else (or you can just move it as you see fit). I figured the "general boating discussion" area might be as good a place as any.

That's pretty cool, I'm not going to lie. If you rig a variable speed fan up in front of you so you also felt the effects of speed would be pretty wicked as well, especially in the winter months

Thanks :)

Ha, that's a clever idea with the fan and could be fun. :) Maybe with an Arduino you could control the fan speed by linking it to the speed of the boat.

if your going to have the wipeout be blow overs, the boats should be cats, with the V's you coulld program in so rather interesting chine walk....

Well that's just it: There's nothing in the code at all that tells the boats to chine walk or blow over. It just happens as a result of the physics code naturally. :)

WOW this looks like a blast!!! excellent work!! I wish I had your talent!

Couple of wants --

1. (no offense to the outboard folks) Please let's have some IO's there. If I'm going to play I want to have the biggest meanest HP toys out there- especially since no gas cost is involved!!!
2. Roar of the engines
3. Gages including trim control a must
4. Wave and wind parameters-- something a little short of a hurricane would be acceptable
5. The use of variable speed fans would really add to enjoyment-- I've got the kids all lined up to spray water on me with a spray bottle
6. For us novices -- a docking exercise complete with the distractions of spilling drinks on the driver during the maneuvers, bumpers not deployed, a wife yelling to slow down
7. If you really want to get fancy -- putting the boat in the water and of course getting the boat centered on the trailer, smoking the tires up the ramp and of course dropping the transmission-- adding ramp rage would be over the top.

Again, I'm looking forward to the finished product

All the best

3pointstar

kinda like real life . . . just happens because of physics :D



Thats great! looking forward to seeing/playing a demo.

Is it going to have offshore V's and cats or only Allison/ Action Marine lake boats ? Would be great if it would have an offshore experience feeling of rough water and running against other boats, choosing different power plants, wheels, setups, graphics etc. Great idea.

GlassDave:
Yep! It just happens because of the physics. The first time it blew over and then later when it porpoised and chine walked without ever writing code to tell it to do any of that, I knew I was on the right track. :)

SkaterMike82:

Right now the plan is to do the initial release with small-ish outboards on calm water lakes/rivers only. If the demand is there and it's popular enough to pay me to do it full time, anything is possible. Without promising anything, I would like to do offshore boats too, but it's a technical leap to do so because of the wave/boat interaction. (F1 and jet boats on small channels would also be interesting). That might take months and months more work to come up with some fancy system to handle all that though. I've heard of guys spending two years doing nothing but water waves, and those don't even interact with any objects most of the time.

On top of that I'm not sure if that would work well with the Oculus Rift. People tend to get sick pretty easily in virtual reality, and having a boat rocking and jumping off waves constantly might be a recipe for dirty keyboards. Still though, it is something I'm interested in. The big offshore boats are super cool, and it'd be neat to maybe be in an enclosed cockpit out on the ocean with the engines screaming in your ears, even more so in virtual reality via Oculus Rift. With the inboards I could make use of the engine simulation stuff I've written too maybe, so you could choose the camshaft, intake/exhaust runner dimensions, and so on.

That'd be pretty wild, but it's a lot of work so we'll see how things pan out. After fourteen years developing simulations, I've learned that one can very easily turn a one or two year project into a ten year thing by getting a little too excited about every possible thing that could be done, so I've got to be somewhat careful and not get too carried away.

In short, it's a big job to do waves like that in a way that interact with the boat like I'd want them to where the boat influences the waves in return, so sadly that won't be something that comes along unless this sim takes off enough. Even then it'd be a maybe, we'll see. If you hit the "like" or "share" Facebook buttons on the page in the link, you might help me drum up enough interest to have a good launch. Seeing a lot of people enjoying the possibilities is good for the motivation too... :)

3pointStar: Great list, thanks! One quick note on guages: There are some working gauges on a couple of the videos on the page at least, including jack plate and engine trim. There was no way I'd make a boat sim without at least those, that's half the fun of driving a boat! :D

I can do character animation. Maybe the wife wagging her finger at you on the dock or waving at you to come in after you've been on the water too long would be funny.

If the above ever happens, please give us 1/2yr to 1yr heads up before it's available to the public.

It will take me that long to plan shutting down work for a year.

Interesting simulator and seeing some of the background work that goes into something like this.

The sim and boat itself is not exciting to me. Agree I/O may have a stronger attraction or flatten the deck more and put fishing pedestals on it for the bass boat guys. Maybe think about packaging it as an additional module to a fishing program? Lets be honest, bass boaters seem more excited about blasting out and back than fishing sometimes.....

As far as stand alone marketability, I would think jet boat channel racing would be better. Fast paced, exciting with plenty of options to increase skill level challenges.

Thanks for sharing!

@SB: Hahaha, thanks :D

I am very interest in this as I have recently jumped into the world of Auto Racing Simulators. The Oculs Rift is an interesting device, but I think it needs a lot of tweaking before it will be accepted on a large scale. Definitely keep us updated. Also you might want to throw up a post over at inside sim racing's forums. I would also suggest contacting a company by the name of SimXperence. They have a piece of software that works to recreat effects such as engine vibration, bumps, etc to be used with Tactile Transducers (Bass Shakers). I added this software along with a couple of shakers to my sim and it completely changed things. I think being able to add effect such as the feel of the bottom of the boat and engine rpm would be HUGE in your simulator. Also check out simfunding.com. I believe the purpose of this site is to allow developers such as yourself to raise money for your project. I think you have a great idea and it's a segment of video games and simulators that has been missing for a long time. If you are successful in creating your sim for consumers, the next step would be to create a set of throttle controls with trim buttons. I don't see why there would be a need to develop a wheel as there are plenty on the market already (why reinvent the wheel, pun intended). Good Luck.

Upgraded pedals have already been installed.....
http://i817.photobucket.com/albums/z...ps860cbd54.jpg

low_psi:

NICE sim setup :D

I've been a sim racer since Hard Drivin' in the arcades. What are you driving? Live For Speed, iRacing, and Assetto Corsa have been favorites of mine. My G-25 broke so for the boat sim I'm just using a joystick for the time being. What's your monitor setup? I'm running triple 24 inchers at 5870x1200 res.

Thanks for reminding me of Inside Sim Racing. They did a story on another product I developed, VRC Pro, some time back. I didn't even think of them for this, but will check out their forums. Thanks for the suggestion!

I've heard of the bass shakers but have never tried one. Are they really that awesome? Thanks again, I'll look into that as well as simfunding.com. That site is new to me. I suppose it's a bit like Kickstarter then?

I've got a friend in the Netherlands that works at a company that builds their own high end custom racing controls including FFB wheels, pedals, and gear shifters. I didn't even think of asking him about this. You're absolutely right though, a hand throttle for a boat sim with the trim controls might be just the thing. :)

To make it even more like the real thing make sure they break all the time, and if you can collect two of them then they are both broke at the same time.

And also put in some shady mechanics that rip you off until you find a good one.

[QUOTE=3pointstar;4270395
3. Gages including trim control a must
4. Wave and wind parameters-- something a little short of a hurricane would be acceptable
3pointstar[/QUOTE]

What is wrong with a hurricane.... That would be awesome... :-)

I race (haven't much this winter) competitive RC so I am familiar with VRC pro. I have tried out the trial version, but never bought the usb adapter to use my Spektrum Radio. A few of the guys I race with use it quite often. My Sim set up is a made from scratch Cockpit made by me featuring a Dodge Viper Seat, Thrustmaster TX Wheel base w/Ferrari GTE458, Clubsport V2 Aluminum Pedals (not pictured). 2 Aura AST-2b-4 Bass shakers powered by a 2 channel 150 watt amp. For display I am using a BenQ W1070 1080p Projector (3d capable just haven't tried the sim with 3d yet) on a 92" High Contrast Screen. I primarily run iRacing, but occasionally play Assetto Corsa when I want to see over the top graphics (iracing is no slouch). My sim, as you can see in the pic, is right smack in the middle of my home theater, so going with triple monitors is out of the question as it would take up too much space. However, my plan next fall is to add some linear actuators and go full motion. If I do that, the simulator will be moved to the garage and then I will add triple monitors. Simvibe is actually a subset of the SimXperience software which is to power full motion. I think your sim with full motion would be over the top. Especially with chine walk and/or proposing.....

The Bass shakers alone, just using low frequencies provided thru the speaker outputs really didn't add too much (as there is so much more to a race car then just things that produce low frequency sounds). However with the addition of SimVibe, it completely changed things. SimVibe translates data from the game to usable frequencies that are output to a second sound card to be used exclusively with the bass shakers. This really woke the game up. SimVibe also allows the user to tweak all kinds of setting so you can make a profile for each vehicle inside of iRacing. As each car has its own, different dynamics. Believe it or not, I'd say my lap times improved with the addition of the SimVibe software and shakers as it helps feel the road, curbs, etc and you get a better feel for what the car is doing.

At one point we looked at doing a simulator ride (8 person) for boat shows using onboard footage and data from Miss Geico. neat stuff.

low_psi:

I'm really impressed with your sim setup. Thanks for taking the time to share and tell me about it. That's really something special. The fact that you designed and built it yourself makes it that much more impressive.

I'll keep my eyes open for an opportunity to try the shakers and vibe equipment. I figured it was more of a gimmick, but after reading what you've written on it, I can see it's much more than that. The fact that you were able to improve your lap times from it speaks volumes about how integral it really is to the whole setup. Adding motion next? That'd be pretty amazing. I think you're right, doing that in the boat sim would be a good idea. It might even help with motion sickness if I do get around to doing offroad powerboats some day in the rough stuff. It'd sure be fun though, that's for sure.

Maximus: That'd be a heck of a thing to try. I tried one that was an F1 car thing that was similar in concept. It was neat, but not as convincing as I imagine a boat simulator ride being.

just looking at the video the game looks extremely fun to try, have you heard of the game vechile simulator? its much like your game you have created and has the option to alter vehicles so that you can tweak hp, how it rides, weight, size and is a blast to play. you could (and should) replicate a lot of things in that game that make it enjoyable. the little things like pannels at the bottom to know speed, have throttle contol there, steering instruments, and most other gagues. its the closest thing to a powerboat simulator and it has plenty of mods to tweak after you get bored of the actual game. id love to see this game become big as ive never seen a game where your able to actually have a planing boat, keep up the AMAZING work

Tres Martin is the guy to ask.

Multiple broken boats and a douche bag of a person who was supposed to make on of ours turn key reliable yet failed miserably. Sounds about right ha. First world problems.

This looks awsome !!! I would get into sim just for this an online racing league would be sweet!! Also like others were saying more customization of motors and paint schemes maybe even a campaign mode where once you hit certain achievement you unlock new motors or drives start out as a local river racer and work your way to f1 and then to opa or a large offshore organization that mite be making it to much like a video game but i think it would be a good storyline and keep people attentions

VERY COOL!! I don't normally like video games and simulators much, but this is awesome. I hope it's successful and profitable for you.

make it in a race environment and you would have hundreds of buyers... All the wannabe's (myself included) who would kill for a chance to race offshore boats except their wife saying NO and their life insurance rider not paying the kids if they end up slick side up!!!

i really like the jet boat course idea. that looks a lot of fun for a video game. i would believe offshore races would just get boring. most people who play video games need something fast paced and that could be a super cool way of doing it you could also set it up for a car driving sim so you can use hot food... you just then need hot girls and its the PERFECT GAME

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. There are a lot of good ideas here from game modes to different boats and so on. I'll keep it in mind.

Big waves and offshore boats will be out of the question for the first release unfortunately. If I do waves, I don't want it to work like most boat games where the boats don't actually affect the water. To do it properly like I'd like to would take a long time, so for starters at least I'll be sticking with the gentle lakes and rivers. Otherwise I might be at this for several more years before having anything available to play with.

I'm not sure if it's a good idea, but I'm leaning toward doing the first release with just smaller outboards, then if there's enough interest (sales) move on to other types of boats like inboards and jets. Will see how it goes, if things are popular enough to warrant it, perhaps offshore with the big waves could be an option some day.

Hot girls: I thought of this too, sex sells after all. It's not too hard to add some babes laying or dancing around on the beaches here and there. Maybe I'll do that, if nothing else it'd be good box art. :D Maybe a nudie or two could be hidden somewhere as Easter Eggs. ;)

If any of you think of anything else, don't hesitate to speak up!

I remember playing shipsim a few years ago with the fountain they had.The adjustability for seastate and weather was great but their was no way to make a racecourse or compete which really limited the game. You could really go nuts in some big water though....

You should probably benchmark shipsim. It had a lot of potential, just not enough competition to really catch on and take hold. You would be wise to figure put why we all arent virtual boating on ship sim during the offseason, address that then get us hooked,

Good advice, thanks. I have looked at ShipSim a few times over the years, most recently I bought the latest one on Steam Early Access: European Ship Simulator. It's great at capturing the feeling of the big ships. That only has one small boat in it at this stage (more will probably come later), but I wasn't particularly impressed with the physics on that. There doesn't seem to be much there in the way of planed physics or aerodynamics.

It does waves and buoyancy in those waves really well though, so when puttering around at low speeds in big ships it's quite convincing and does a good job. The rain/storm effects are good, I enjoyed driving the ships at night during storms.

New video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os07IiyGYnA

Just wire a mechanical bull into the app and go

physics look great . . . . except i think the guy would've flown out :D



it does have a realistic look to it. I see a little chine walk and the blow over was pretty convincing.

A few people have mentioned motion simulators. That would indeed be fun. One guy that has a really nice motion simulator asked to get on a mailing list so he can buy this when it comes out. I must admit it would be really neat to try it on that. I'm not totally sure about the software end of it though, what exactly I'd need to do to make it work.

Guy flying out: Oh yeah, there's no way he'd stick to the seat like that. Maybe if time permits I can try to turn him into a rag doll that gets tossed out when appropriate. That'd be fun.

Showing off the new instrument panel and some of the dynamics resulting from extreme engine trim and jack plate adjustments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wphpfF3kQn8&feature=youtu.be

Really like the changes made.....looks awesome!!!

It's coming! Looking good!

Todd Wasson,

Great to see someone working towards a boating simulator. But my first reaction when visiting your website was, sigh.... Simply due to seeing DirectX11 being used rather than openGL. You may want to rethink using directx11, though you are probably so ingrained in directx11, you have no desire to re-code. I am sure there is no need to discuss the merits of the two with you, but here is a link for others that may not be familiar with the two. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...L_and_Direct3D

The below is based on my 34 years of PC gaming as a user, and 20 years of Linux development for professional and personal use. It is rather lengthy, but you should consider what is happening in the developing world beyond M$. There is a major shift going on right now. Due to the progress and proliferation of the Arm processor and Arm based SOC's, GPU's, etc, in other words, singleboard arm devices. M$ like when 64 bit Amd processors came out, is far behind Linux, when it comes to the Arm architecture support.

The Arm architecture due to its lower cost to manufacture is most probably eventually going to replace the X86 architecture for the average computer user. It already has, with smart phones and tablets. But it will also, in the desktop area, and is already used for gaming on the smaller devices, and might eventually replace current X86 architecture gaming based machines. As Arm device manufacturing numbers increases, cost will decrease, while X86 architecture manufacturing decreases, due to lower demand, cost will increase. It is probably safe to say, that X86, or more specifically Amd_x86 (64bit) will not disappear, while X86_128bit may/will eventually appear. Though, as the Arm architecture capability approaches the current level of the X86 architecture, Arm due to the lower cost to manufacture will most probably replace X86 for the majority of end users. In many cases, it already has.

If you want to offer your product to the largest number potential customers world wide, you need to go openGL. Steam is finally releasing the Steam Machines, which uses the SteamOS which is Linux of course. While the user numbers on Steam shows that the games that are Linux/Mac/Win capable have the most users, by a wide margin. You should not discount the Linux user base. There is a far larger Linux base than most people think, in the US, while the percentages are much higher outside of the US. People around the world are shying away from supporting US companies like M$. If you do not know why, ask Snowden.

Nintendo, has reversed their decision to only design for their hardware platform only. They have taken notice of the proliferation of cheap Arm gaming devices. It makes sense to develop in a manner that works for all platforms. People cannot be expected to purchase multiple different devices when everything can be done on one. Even though the Arm32 architecture currently is not powerful enough for the most demanding games, Arm64 will eventually. Not to mention that the GPU capability is more important than the CPU in the most taxing games. GPU development for Arm devices is progressing at a rapid pace. I doubt X86 and Amd_X86 will be going away any time soon, and may even see 128 bit in time. For those that are not aware, X86 denotes 32 bit, while Amd_X86 denotes 64 bit. Amd produced the first 64 bit processor long before Intel, hence the naming convention in Linux. Which was 64 bit capable long before anything by M$. But by using openGL rather than directX11, it matters not what OS the end user uses.

M$ has renewed/redoubled their effort to produce an Arm OS, due to the popularity of the Raspberry PI, they were losing future programmers. They kept the boat from sinking on the 64 bit release by Amd and Linux, but this time they have not been able to stop Arm devices from being put on the shelves like they did with Amd64 bit computers with Linux. Linux has gained the traction with the average user that M$ and Apple has worked so hard to stop.

Never the less, Linux has traction that is not going away, the majority of all Arm singleboard development is Linux with Apple in a distant second, and M$ just finally showing up. The most creative stuff is coming out of Open Source, with hundreds of millions of people developing and contributing. Old standard corporate structures simply cannot compete on the same level, they may be able to provide for a select few, but cannot do so for the masses. No one corporation can hire a work force as large as the Linux world wide work force. Statistics shows that as much as 78% of all small devices run Android, Linux. People are installing Linux in nearly all flavors, as well as Android, on Arm singleboards for media-servers, as desktops, for home controlling, as well as a myriad of projects that the big corporation never thought of or allowed. While eventually as Arm64 comes about and processing power increases, desktops will be supplanted by peoples phones. No point to have a phone and a desktop when the phone can do everything the desktop does, dock it and use any monitor, keyboard, mouse, trackball you want. Have everything with you were ever you go.

The Steam Streaming will also change how things are done with gaming. Rather than having to purchase a dedicated gaming machine for every child/person in the house. One Steam Machine can do the heavy lifting with games being streamed to less capable devices attached to any monitor/tv in the house. Obviously reducing the household cost for providing for the more cpu/gpu intensive games that actually need dedicated gaming resources. Like all things, after the more creative finally prove the masses of so called experts wrong, the rest will follow.

Steam is not the only company working on streaming games. There is work on using Amazon AWS servers to do the heavy lifting then stream the processed content to end users on devices that are incapable of running a cpu/gpu intensive game. In other words, run a game that you now have to run on your $2,000 dedicated gaming machine, on your $600 smart phone attached to your computer monitor, keyboard, trackball/mouse or your 65 inch tv. The goal is to get to that sweet spot of current gaming platforms price point, $200-$400 dollars yet running games that currently need a $1,000 -$2,000 dedicated gaming machine. Simply put, more people can afford a $300 device than a $1,500 one. Put that into the context of 2-4 child household, that is a substantial difference.

I am currently doing a lot of work with many of the new Arm singleboards. We are replacing x86, architecture devices with Arm singleboard devices, due to lower cost, lower power consumption, lower replacement/upgrade cost. For everything from small servers to multi-media devices, in business environments, were a small location device makes more sense than using a server on Amazon AWS, or typical higher cost X86 server. It will not be long till Arm singleboards start replacing X86 desktops. The singleboard devices are perfect for use for controlling things in a computer driven home. Lower cost, less power consumption, less heat, less space, some are literally the size of a credit card. The big little endian devices are going to be replacing desktops. Which comprise of multi core larger cpu's working in conjunction with multi core smaller cpu's that switch with frequency scaling as load and resource needs change. Using the little cores when sitting idle or doing little work like writing a letter or email, but crank up the bigger cores for multi-media and gaming use.

Things are moving along very fast, while the stable kernel version for Arm is nearly to the x86 stable level. The hold up has been getting all the new SOC and board drivers debugged, combined with a lot of up and coming developer/manufactures, that lack Linux experience, and do not follow proper guidelines for interacting with upstream developers. Like Linus_Torvalds the lead kernel maintainer, and the hardware manufactures themselves. Hence the busy schedule causes those that that do not follow simple guidelines, to be ignored. Some of it is simply the language barrier, a lot is coming out of China, but they are learning English fast.

The Raspberry Pi http://www.raspberrypi.org/, really kicked things off. The primary goal of the Raspberry Pi was to produce a cheap computer ($35) so kids can start learning to code. Of course it is primarily directed towards gaming, games are the first things kids do with computers, but the developers never envisioned all the uses that have been applied to the Raspberry PI. The RaspBerry Pi really started a snowballing affect of cheap Arm singleboard computers. They thought they might sell 20,000, they have sold 3 million and climbing, while millions of other more capable arm singleboards have been manufactured and sold. The Raspberry Pi, helped the market to be realized.

I have been building custom OS's based on the Linux kernel for the past 20 years. Gentoo is by far the best for development due to it being a compiling flavor with a package manager (portage) that allows for easy compilation flag settings. It is the certainly the best for cross compiling in development setups. Many developers, NASA, many big universities, corporations, etc. all over the world use Gentoo, or a different flavor of Linux. Most people do not realize, the Internet runs on Linux, as do the majority of servers, your cars and boats computer is Linux, though some have a M$ sound system, but the engine controllers are all Linux, as well as 98.2% of the top 500 supercomputers. There is one lone M$ supercomputer. That alone says everything. http://www.top500.org/statistics/list/

Had to spit due to limit constraints.

I am simply attempting to point out, that by sticking to directX11, the largest portion of the current and future user base, is being ignored. The SteamOS and Steam Machines, is finally going to push more game developers to start developing for cross platform use. Nearly ALL of the open source developers that developed initially for Linux, have developed for cross platform use, their products are available on Linux, Mac and M$. There is simply no reason for game developers to not do the same, unless of course they have signed one of those non-disclosure agreements with M$ that stops them from developing for other platforms, to get cheaper support from M$. The way M$ has handled access to API's has been a big issue with the EU, which brought forth the million dollar a day fine against M$. Not to mention that nearly all of professional graphics is done with openGL (the graphics you see in movies), due to the greater performance and the open architecture. Not being forced under the thumb of one corporation has many benefits.

M$'s hard fought monopoly in the gaming arena is falling by the wayside. The demand for games on Linux is high, simply visit any Linux flavor forums, and you will find tens of thousands of complaints and wishes for game developers to start developing for other than M$. My personal experience, is that playing the same game on Linux on the same machine, dual boot, the Linux always plays better with higher FPS.

To get a better idea of were it is all going. I suggest taking a look at the resources and communities that have developed due to the actual manufactures of the new CPU's and GPU's, it is not just AMD and Intel any longer. The below are the most common of the Arm manufactures, and of course is but a short list, while there is no need to include AMD, Nvidia, Intel, everyone knows them. I am currently working with single boards, SOC's, CPU's. GPU's from all the below, doing development and subsequently bug testing/quashing. In the process of writing up some how-to's for the Gentoo wiki, for the less experienced to get up and running with some of the most common arm singleboards, just to give back a bit to the Linux community.

http://www.freescale.com/
http://www.ti.com/
http://www.allwinnertech.com/en/
http://www.broadcom.com/
http://www.amlogic.com/
http://www.marvell.com/
http://www.xilinx.com/

That's quite a lot of information, thanks. I haven't read all of it just yet, but the thrust of it seems to be about switching to OpenGL instead of DirectX.

I've been a simulation developer since about 2000 and was using OpenGL for my own graphics engines until pretty recently, so you're somewhat preaching to the choir here. I found it much easier to code with OpenGL than DirectX. But here's the thing: The boat simulator is using Unity3D which is an existing engine similar to the Unreal Engine (it's a competitor's product). In short, I didn't have to write the graphics engine for this, I just use what Unity provides. I do in fact use a little bit of OpenGL in the boat simulator to draw force vectors and so forth.

If Unity decides to switch over to OpenGL, from my perspective as a Unity user it would be transparent, so I'll let them make the decisions based on information like you've provided. I'm not sure how accurate this is, but there are estimates that about half of game developers are using Unity these days. It supports something like 21 different platforms including X-Box, Playstation, Android, etc.. How they do that is beyond me, it's all under the hood. Perhaps it switches to OpenGL for some platforms, I really don't know.

In Unity the only way to use compute shaders (the GPU programming you're talking about, see my channel for real time engine simulations that I wrote using compute shaders) is to use DirectX11 because the compute shader stuff is built on DirectCompute using HLSL. OpenGL won't do for that, and I'm not about to try to bypass Unity's graphics engine and write my own to replace it. That kind of defeats the purpose of using an existing engine.

Before I started working on the boat simulation in late 2014, I was the physics engine developer and vehicle dynamics engineer for VRC (Virtual RC Racing) and VRC Pro (the successor and current product).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSfoGDWMzgo Here are the official trailers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw8-Z4IPTjg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-ZJGnrPpQI


I was involved in that from 2000 to early 2014. We wrote our own engines for that from scratch which took years and years (four years for the first title and six years for the second). As the physics engine developer, I had nothing to do with the graphics engine, but they were using DirectX. The guy that wrote the graphics engine was interested in doing OpenGL too, but practically speaking it can be really expensive to do both. If I took a year off of physics engine development and vehicle dynamics work to help him write an OpenGL version of the renderer, I wouldn't be making new vehicles or improving the physics for that time. The suspension system above was a major rewrite that took me nine months, so it's a lot of work and takes serious time to do this kind of thing that would have been traded away for Linux support or whatever. So there's a big cost there that none of us could see being justified. I don't know, we might have taken seven or eight years to develop VRC Pro instead of six had we done that, which would mean I wouldn't be doing the boat simulator now and this conversation wouldn't be happening.

We targeted the typical Windows user and didn't even bother with Apple or Linux or the others because the market share on those was too small to bother with. In our case people are managing to run the product on Apple machines anyway with emulators, so it's really a good thing we didn't bother trying to develop the sims twice just to get an extra 5% of the market or whatever it was at the time. We got it for free anyway eventually due to the works of others. The fact is that the vast majority of Windows users didn't know about the product anyway, so the way I saw it, until we could get the product in front of most of them (advertising/marketing) there wasn't much point in going cross platform.

If we had to write a substantial portion of the game twice to support those other platforms we probably wouldn't have done it. There's just not enough money to be made to warrant it. It's hard enough to break even on Windows. The big money is really in the consoles anyway.

As for the architectures you describe, you clearly know a lot more about that than I do. As a Unity engine user though I'm going to let the Unity people decide what they want to do with all that. They already support 21 or so different platforms including mobile devices, I literally just have to click a different button to export the game to whichever platform I have a license for. Some small bits of code might have to be rewritten here and there perhaps, but it's not a big deal anymore if you're using something like Unity. I haven't seen any signs that they or the Unreal Engine people are going to drop DirectX for any reason any time soon though. I've been listening to arguments like yours now for 15 or 20 years, many people just keep insisting DirectX will go away for this or that reason and it never does. I'm not an infallible predictor of the future though. I guess time will tell.

It must be said though that if I have to write a game essentially two or three times to get the same sales I can get now due to Windows market dominance, I won't be in business.

Having said all that, the only graphics engines I've written myself were indeed OpenGL just because it's so much easier to work with. I've never written a DirectX graphics engine myself. Cross platform isn't all just about the renderer choice though, writing for Windows is a bit different from writing for other platforms with the message loop and so forth being there. You could write an OpenGL version that only runs on Windows too, it's not all about the renderer.

Not sure if this may be of interest to you or not. You may know this and plenty more already, but just in case:

I just checked my web site stats and the breakdown of users by operating system is as follows:

Windows 72.2%
Macintosh 17.7%
Linux 9.3%
Others 1.3%

I seem to remember many years ago Windows being more like 90-95% (maybe 15 years ago?), not sure. So while the others are perhaps gaining on Windows, it's taking a very long time. Linux is still only about 10% of these numbers though, and I think the bots and so forth that run on Linux and the others are included in that. With bills to pay it doesn't make any business sense to go to great lengths to support Linux in my case anytime soon. Unity might already do it anyway through a build option, I haven't checked.

I remember working with a guy probably 20 years ago that was all about Linux too, he was convinced it'd take over the world and Microsoft would go away, but the fact remains that it simply hasn't. I just don't see it happening, personally, at least not at the rate it's been going since 2000. It's like one percentage point a year or something.

As for the Mac users, they can run emulators that will run Windows games anyway (we have threads in VRC Pro forums from many people doing it), so that 15-20% group is taken care of by developing it for Windows using either DirectX or OpenGL anyway.

Anyway, I'm not trying to argue. Maybe what you're saying will come to pass, I can't predict the future as well as you might be able to. From where I stand right now though it doesn't make sense to bend over backwards to grab that last 10%. Realistically, I'll be lucky to ever get my Windows boat sim in front of 0.01% of Windows users anyway. I would focus on getting that high enough before worrying too much about that last 10% of people running Linux or whatever else.