Also, lots of game developers will lead to lots of bugreports to Haiku itself, and if the number of people working on the OS itself doesn’t grow, that will just make the time it takes to solve any problem even longer.
Just yesterday I fixed one ticket and discussed about another in the #5xxx range, opened 10 years ago.
If you want Haiku to move forward, we need people to work on the OS itself, not on games. This means finding more people who want to contribute for free (because they are retired and have nothing else to do, because they are super rich and don’t want to get paid, or, most often, because they are crazy like me and think it’s a fun thing to do on weekends in combination wiht another job). Or, we need more people to donate money to hire developers (there’s one being paid already, but we could add more if we were sure there is a sustainable income in the form of recurring donations allowing us to hire someone long term). At the moment, the paid contract we have is not sustainable (it costs more than the yearly donations). So if things stay as they are, it will only last for a couple years.
Haiku has a Dolphin emulator for DreamCast games - as well as emulators for the Amiga, 3DO, Nintendo 64, Atari 2600/Jaguar/Lynx, Wii, GameCube and PlayStation 2.
If you played games just from the PlayStation 2 - that is around 10,035 games. Someone can spend months just reviewing, testing, and playing those games on Haiku.
Haiku now provides graphic libraries similar to the PlayStation 5.
Now, you even have a Vulkan 1.2 driver for Haiku.
I can already play almost any sound file on Haiku to listen to Tchaikovsky, Bach, Lang Lang, Mozart…,
Just so our kids can play arcade games like Bosconian and Pac-Man on Haiku…
I think everything except the wip stuff from X512 is basically a wrapper around OGL.
But nevertheless, saying that Haiku have
Is just not true. Every 3D lib is similar in some extent to the one probided by PS, but what exactly do you try to say with that?
Also saying
Is wrong because Vulkan is not available for Haiku, not even in nightlys.
I dont understand why do you feel the urge to state non-existent features available, but your statements can cause misconceptions, and while Haiku needs more advertisements, the ads should not based on subjective opinions. At least the ads about the features.
Otherwise we could say: “Haiku have 3D and even 4D+ acceleration, just nobody wrote it yet.”
It’s true that the plumbing under the hood has a lot to do with the performance of the system. Like it or not, a well-performing system will attract the type of users that you seem to be hoping to avoid.
My MorphOS box is a single-threaded PPC G4. That won’t hold me over forever. After overhauling an object-oriented framework in ECX (a version of AmigaE for PPC), it’s unlikely anyone will ever use it. I just uncovered a bug in the smallSet data structure that’s been there for about 10 years that prevented me from using a related piece of code and from releasing the whole thing. What was that piece of code? A text-adventure creation toolkit. If it were used by other people it might have been found sooner. It might not necessarily have been found by me either.
Regarding OS plumbing:
Sometimes all it takes is another set of eyes. Other times it takes years of being shelved. I’d prefer the former as well as you do but if code isn’t used, there won’t be motivation to find the bugs. Financial incentives would be nice too but if code is shelved and nobody uses it, it becomes bitrotted all too quickly.
Why do you use code in an operating system? It’s a shared resource used by applications, pure and simple.
I’m not trying to avoid users, I’m trying to avoid bringing them in too early and not being able to support them.
As for “shelved” code, currently a large part of the needed code (3d acceleration) does not exist at all, and the other parts already get a fair amount of use from our current users, for example through WebKit (what I see most) and I guess also through all other ongoing efforts: Qt port, new platforms, native apps like Medo, and so on.
I don’t feel the need for attracting users with different needs and desires right now, it seems we could attract more users who need what we already cover, first.
