Agree. But compared to the new APIs, OpenGL is better in that regard. I would argue that legacy OpenGL is even better.
You can implement in software whatever you want and just handwave specific parts to GL, like rasterization. The rest of the boilerplate code will be minimal.
In new APIs you are bound to write 100s of lines of boilerplate code to get to the point. In the time you should be learning about barycentric coordinates, you are still learning about descriptor sets. And still, you don't learn about rasterization, texture mapping, clipping, face culling, because they are still fixed pipeline.
The only problem with learning with 100% cpu rendering is that you need some patience before seeing beautiful stuff because you need to learn/implement everything up until that point.
Yeah, it may not be in the spirit of 90s software rasterizing, but since you don't offload the transform, lighting, and rasterizing procedures to specialized hardware, you technically do it "with code". The parallelization goes against the spirit though.
Shameless plug of my upcoming game [1] which uses software rendering. Also did a Show HN and write-up [2] last year for a previous game [3] using the same engine.
I know I am in the minority and my uses/needs/requirements are not average, but I am perfectly fine with running Xubuntu on the following hardware: 1) 4GB 2011 Thinkpad with HDD (yeah really) and 2) 4GB 2009 Phenom desktop (was Win10 until a month ago).
By fine I mean running all these at the same time: firefox with several tabs, development tools, Blender and GIMP. All snappy and fast. Even the HDD in the laptop is only an annoyance during/after a cold boot. Then it makes no difference. I daily drive both for the past 8-15 years. The laptop sits at ~10-15W idle and the i5 in it is a workhorse if needed.
Of course there are uses for better hardware, I am not dismissing upgrades. But the whole modern hw/sw situation is a giant shipwreck and a huge waste of resources/energy. I've tried very expensive new laptops for work (look up "embodied energy"), and Windows 11 right-click takes half a second to respond and Unity3D can take several minutes to boot up. It's really sad.
edit: To be honest I have to add a counter-example: streaming >=1080p60 video from YT is kind of a no-no, but that's related to the first sentence of my post.
I found out about profiles recently and I just couldn't believe that that's the standard way to access them. Also, it's not obvious which profile you are currently on, so there are some silly but necessary workarounds like having a dummy bookmark with the profile name on each or something like that, while it could just be a string next to the address bar.
It works really well though. Does exactly what I would expect and hope from such a feature.
If you keep resolution low, manage your scene complexity carefully and commit to the art style, you can make reasonable 3D games that run even on 20 year old hardware. I did so as an experiment on my game [1] [2] and now that I can see that it works, I am working on a second, more "serious" and complete one. Computers are fast.
It would be cool indeed, I played around with !include_str and co. and works as expected. It wouldn't be possible for the user to modify the assets though, and to save the settings file.
Nice discussions! I've seen many of these projects lately around related communities. Happy to see a trend around this, as I really think there is actual merit in the topic. My project was more of a random timesink than something that pushes the matter forward though.
You can implement in software whatever you want and just handwave specific parts to GL, like rasterization. The rest of the boilerplate code will be minimal.
In new APIs you are bound to write 100s of lines of boilerplate code to get to the point. In the time you should be learning about barycentric coordinates, you are still learning about descriptor sets. And still, you don't learn about rasterization, texture mapping, clipping, face culling, because they are still fixed pipeline.
The only problem with learning with 100% cpu rendering is that you need some patience before seeing beautiful stuff because you need to learn/implement everything up until that point.