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One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

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Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#101

Post by loup-vaillant »

AgentME wrote: post #39
nine_k wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would make such a platform less of a compromise than a web browser? How would programming in C++ be less pain than programming in JS / HTML / CSS? At the very least, JS code won't write past array bounds, or smash the stack. From relevant olden times, Lisp and Smalltalk environments were closest to the ideal. They were expensive though, and nobody distributed them for free, as Netscape did with the browser. They…

I think people really underrate browsers. The browser standards are open and have multiple open source implementations. People associate browsers too much with annoying trashy ad-based and other questionable websites to see how good they are themselves. Electron has an annoyingly heavy download size but it's not the only option for native releases of web-based apps. Windows and some other OSes have built-in browser w…

> The browser standards are open and have multiple open source implementations.

The browser standards are open only in name. The sad fact is, implementing those standards are flat out impossible if you’re not a megacorp. They’re just too damn big: I recall someone counted like more than a hundred million words.

Now using those standards is easy, you can implement a subset. But the number of browser engines that actually supports enough of those standards will only decrease.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#102

Post by loup-vaillant »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #91
forty wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really sure for how long we will have multiple implementations. And we won't have for sure any new implementation, we are stuck with the 3 we have and can only hope the 2 non chrome ones will survive.

That's exactly what people said about IE over 20 years ago. History has proven this reasoning untrue. Web isn't going anywhere. If there's an opportunity to build something 10x better than Chrome, it'll be shipped.

> If there's an opportunity to build something 10x better than Chrome, it'll be shipped.

There won’t be. Since IE6 the standards have grown to inhuman proportions, and implementing a new browser engine is even more difficult than it was then.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#103

Post by anonyfox »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #66
nine_k wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They showed time and again that they don't want a too-wide developer audience. They already have too many apps, and see the choice fatigue in users. They want big companies professionally produce polished stuff that commands, say, $14.99 in app store, of which $5 is Apple's share. They want stuff like Beatmaker or ProCreate. Small fry need not apply; if they insist, they should at least clear the threshold of owning…

> They showed time and again that they don't want a too-wide developer audience. Indeed. And that is (one reason) why Mac will never be more than a third-rate platform. As I said, they're shooting themselves in the foot.

The real world runs on Linux (from servers, data centers, microcontrollers, ...), business runs on Microsoft/Office, and creative makers (from designers to OSS creators) do it on a Mac.

Of course not 100% true but wherever I look its like >50% true at least.

Not to mention being the most valuable company in the world, sitting on _not_ the majority of users _but_ the majority of user revenue/wallet sizes, and having more cash to spend at hand than nearly every other company in the world has in total revenue, to the point of surpassing small/medium countries' GDP.

So far, "shooting themselves in the foot" I would not 100% agree with. And depending who you're asking, the Mac is the #1 platform, and is even growing since M1 chip releases.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#104

Post by cpill »

Its weird that there is no online portal for selling access to HTML5 games. Itch doesn't really do it

> Currently all HTML5 games on itch.io are set up to only take payments as donations

Seems like a big hole on the market? Anyone interested in setting up a online games payment gateway?

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#105

Post by livrem »

oli-g wrote: post #98
livrem wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without the time traveling, I would be happy if there was just a single stable, non-bloated, reliable, portable platform that could be used for when you just want to Write Once and then know that it will Run Everywhere _forever_ (* insert disclaimer about nothing literally lasting forever). Not something that rolls out breaking changes every six months. Or six years for that matter. Would not even have to be an…

Isn't .NET Core pretty much what you're describing at this point?

I must admit I never looked at that ecosystem. Does it just happen to have been quite stable or is it a serious design decision they made and are sticking to?

From a quick search I do not get the impression that .NET has been deprecating parts of the API, including Core APIs, in the past, e.g.:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/compatibility/...

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#106

Post by thfuran »

oli-g wrote: post #98
livrem wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without the time traveling, I would be happy if there was just a single stable, non-bloated, reliable, portable platform that could be used for when you just want to Write Once and then know that it will Run Everywhere _forever_ (* insert disclaimer about nothing literally lasting forever). Not something that rolls out breaking changes every six months. Or six years for that matter. Would not even have to be an…

Isn't .NET Core pretty much what you're describing at this point?

I don't have experience with .net core, but working on a cross platform java desktop application has me pretty convinced that "write one, run everywhere" is a pipedream even before you add on "forever". It's maybe more of less fine for small, simple applications, but eventually you'll run into something that doesn't work the same in Windows as in Mac and you'll start having to write platform-specific workarounds. At some point you'll find yourself reflecting into the platform-specific jvm internals to work around some bug or another. Then an os update will break something. Then a jvm update will break something.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#107

Post by stanac »

rowbin wrote: post #99
livrem wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without the time traveling, I would be happy if there was just a single stable, non-bloated, reliable, portable platform that could be used for when you just want to Write Once and then know that it will Run Everywhere _forever_ (* insert disclaimer about nothing literally lasting forever). Not something that rolls out breaking changes every six months. Or six years for that matter. Would not even have to be an…

Win32 is probably as close as it gets

But it's not cross platform. Unless you count wine.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#109

Post by stanac »

livrem wrote: post #105
oli-g wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't .NET Core pretty much what you're describing at this point?

I must admit I never looked at that ecosystem. Does it just happen to have been quite stable or is it a serious design decision they made and are sticking to? From a quick search I do not get the impression that .NET has been deprecating parts of the API, including Core APIs, in the past, e.g.: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/compatibility/...

.NET was pretty stable. I remember porting old .NET Framework 4.x MVC web app to .NET Core 2, and then to .NET 5. Both times it took less than an hour to port. Old directory structure and APIs still work even if they are not the new hot way to do things. Microsoft is known for backward compatibility.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#110

Post by nolist_policy »

livrem wrote: post #92
ryandrake wrote: post #3

If I had a time traveling magic wand, the one Software Thing I would wish for would be that native, cross platform toolkits had won the war rather than the whole industry punting and declaring The Web Browser to be the target platform, or these super-high-level Game Engines. For decades, I always hopelessly thought the OS and hardware gaps would eventually be bridged by something like Qt or SDL or wxWidgets, and we'd…

Even without the time traveling, I would be happy if there was just a single stable, non-bloated, reliable, portable platform that could be used for when you just want to Write Once and then know that it will Run Everywhere _forever_ (* insert disclaimer about nothing literally lasting forever). Not something that rolls out breaking changes every six months. Or six years for that matter. Would not even have to be an…

Web browsers are remarkably backwards compatible. 20 year old websites continue to work fine.

The things you linked are only advised against for new code:

> These features are likely stable because removing them will cause backward compatibility issues and break legacy websites. (JavaScript has the design goal of "don't break the web".) Still, they are not cross-platform portable and may not be supported by all analysis tools, so you are advised to not use them [...]

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