Will this be a preformance increase?
Finally! Been waiting for this for a couple of years by now.
No kidding. I had already been fairly interested and excited about the mod that already does this, but unfortunately knew it would somewhat split the modding community, as any mod complex enough to call OpenGL directly for anything naturally doesn’t work.
Minecraft switching guarantees mods will support it though. This should be a major boon for the performance of shaders and other visual mods going forward, once mods complete the transition.
I wonder how long it will take to get mod support after the switch? When there’s a major update to the game, it usually takes a long time and there are a lot of mods that don’t get updated because it’s too much work.
They could try making a game that lets you add mods that doesn’t break said mods every update too.
It sure would be nice if Minecraft had a modding API like Luanti.
Ig that means that Fabric and forge arent enough?
They aren’t part of the game. The developers of forge and fabric have to wait until a new version of Minecraft gets released then reverse engineer it to make everything work. If there is a big update, it takes a lot of time.
They stopped obfuscating the code so I imagine it’s a bit easier for mod framework devs now: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/removing-obfuscation-in-java-edition
It’s still not a modding API though so it’ll always take some work when the game updates
And it sure would be nicer if the modding community wasn’t divided coreboot/libreboot style too TT
Thankfully nearly every alternate option eventually gets some sort of library allowing you to load it with forge, but even that’s a mess lately.
hopefully the biggest mods can prepare in advance, the article says a few versions will be released with both OpenGL and Vulkan support, until their Vulkan renderer can reach the stage where it’s good enough to fully replace OpenGL. i’ve heard that the Sodium devs knew (or intuited) of the Vulkan switch in advance, so they already have some work done to support it.
RIP shaders tho, i don’t envy shader developers rn
The Iris devs are making a new mod called Aperture, that will fully replace Iris/Optifine and then some. Hopefully the newer shaders will be able to take advantage of a lot of modern hardware features like ray tracing. It is going to be a real pain to translate existing shaders though (speaking as someone who will have to do that at some point)
The saving grace is we get some semblance of shaders in game that are officially supported and they look quite nice so far. No needing to install a mod loader, shader mod and download different shaders to get stuff working. Vulkan does afford more low level performance and extra functionality over OpenGL though, it will be quite interesting to see what mod authors come up with when we get start getting other vulkan based shader packs. It’ll be a slow process but exciting times!
My only worry is the potential duplicate effort on mod authors having to work with both Vulkan and OpenGL simultaneously. Vulkan is a bit of a mess of a spec and also extremely low level so it requires a developer with a very solid understanding of the graphics process to work with.
