I worked at Autodesk from 2007 - 2011 and on Alias / Alias-related things for a good chunk of that. I was part of the team that ported Alias to MacOS.<p>Alias development started back in the late 80s and was written for (I think) SGI machines. Back then, the company was Alias (merged with Wavefront and ultimately acquired by Autodesk in 2006) and the software was called Studio. OpenGL formalized in the early 90s and Alias (the company) ported Studio to support this nascent API. That meant that Alias could run on any OS that supported OpenGL.<p>This was a fantastic strategic decision because it allowed Studio to port to various flavours of Irix, HP Unix, Windows, Mac OS, and even Linux. The Linux build was/is internal. It was a little janky to use as a modeller 8 hours a day, but good enough for a development workflow.<p>Porting to Mac OS occurred in 2008 (I think) and was a reasonably sized project. Alias renders all of its own UI in OpenGL, so in theory, it was as simple as "Get a GLContext, and render to that". Of course, there were other things to deal with:<p><pre><code> - Cocoa specifics like windows / events
- Various filesystem differences
- IPC (Alias launches a subprocess to open new files to insulate a bad .wire file from crashing the main process)
- Performance issues caused by various aged code (e.g., still a few places using display lists).
</code></pre>
I don't have any specifics for <i>why</i> Autodesk invested in porting Studio to MacOS back then. Apple was on the upward trend in terms of design and market share. I can speculate Apple was demanding a Mac OS version of Alias for its own use since, as others pointed out, Apple is a pretty big Autodesk customer.<p>I agree with the other points made here that the decision was likely made that the ROI of maintaining the Apple port wasn't worth it. Sure was fun to write though. :)
I can understand Autodesk not wanting to bother with Mac development any more. Apple's aggressive and inconsiderate moves make it a pain to even maintain existing app projects on the Mac.
Unsurprising. This is one public announcement, but it's inevitable that there are many more products which will cease support for MacOS.<p>OpenGL is an established industry-standard graphics API. Supported on every platform of note. Drop it, and you're going to lose developers who rely on it. A vendor-specific proprietary API isn't an improvement, it's regressive. There are many products which won't be able to justify a Metal port, including one of my own. Despite its ugliness, OpenGL worked everywhere and modern OpenGL is actually pretty decent.<p>If Apple want to retain developers, they need to have a long, hard think about their strategy here. I'll consider supporting MacOS again, if they can cut back on proprietary stuff and support the industry-standard stuff. OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan would be a good start.
Somewhat ironic that apparently a lot of Apple products have been designed using Alias, at least the original iMac, according to a biography of Jony Ive.<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=CRZuAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT106&lpg=PT106&dq=autodesk+alias+apple+computer&ots=Xprx2bJZaG&sig=CPJD7j6JY8TU6Jaeg7kcFkS59G4&q=autodesk%20alias%20apple%20computer&f=false#v=snippet&q=autodesk%20alias%20apple%20computer&f=false" rel="nofollow">https://books.google.com/books?id=CRZuAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT106&lpg=...</a>
Can't blame them for not wanting to port to Metal.<p>However, I found that out from the comments on HN - because when I opened the page the article was covered by a full popup informing me that they 'care about my privacy'. And then they probably wanted me to agree to being tracked. Not sure because I instaclosed it.
It’s too bad, Metal has gotten very good. Blizzard ported the Mac versions of their games over to Metal a couple years ago and has been riding up against the edge of what’s possible with Metal. As of the latest WoW update, Metal performance is ridiculously good — barely distinguishable from DX12 under Windows on the same hardware. It’s amazing, I’ve never seen any game run this well under macOS.<p>This may have been achievable with OpenGL, but I have doubts. Should Apple have waited for Vulkan to be finished up before making their choice of modern graphics API in iOS + macOS? Maybe, but if they had, their Vulkan implementation wouldn’t have been as mature as Metal is now and the existence of MoltenVK renders the whole thing moot anyway.<p>Which makes me wonder, why not consider porting Alias to Vulkan? I’m not sure that OpenGL has much of a future on any platform, now that most everything will be written for DX12, Vulkan, or Metal. At best, frozen-in-time support for it will remain in Windows and Linux for a few more years, but I don’t see it being developed any further... didn’t Apple just jump ahead to OpenGL’s inevitable conclusion?
> Prior versions of Alias (2019.0 and earlier) can continue to run on High Sierra or earlier operating system versions.<p>> Alias is not supported on High Sierra due to a macOS incompatibility that Apple does not currently plan to fix.<p>Wait, so is Alias supposed to work on High Sierra (which has a non-deprecated OpenGL) or not?
Mojave only deprecates OpenGL, but it doesn't remove it as far as I understand. It will continue to ship with the (somewhat outdated) OpenGL version that macOS has provided for several years, no? Did they even try running their own product on the Mojave betas? Seems strange to discontinue a working product just because an API is marked "deprecated"?
That article is pretty salty, it seems they want Apply to supply them with OpenGL "or else". Either they are using an engine that doesn't allow for other low level rendering options or they simply don't want to.
TBH, the writing was on the wall since the announcement. Very reminiscent of situation with Adobe and Premiere, which spawned FCP and a decade-old grudge between the companies.<p>I have to ask this, even though I use OSX but have no idea, can drivers provided by third parties include openGL support for MacOS? Nvidia provides drivers for their cards regularly. Does it work like on other OS'?
I left feedback on the page that it wasn't helpful. Saying, "Once Apple releases Mojave, no versions of VRED will run on that operating system due to the OpenGL deprecation" doesn't help their case, because it's just wrong. I do hope Autodesk is able to put pressure on Apple to continue to support OpenGL, but they have to get their facts straight.
Engineers: we can do X and finish in two weeks, or we can take a shortcut and finish in one week, but the code will be tightly coupled to this particular quirk of OpenGL.<p>Manager: take the shortcut :)<p>... repeat this for 15 years ...