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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

#111

Post by wolfendin »

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.

How do you reconcile your hypothesis that Apple is shooting themselves in the foot with the past 13 years of success they’ve achieved with this setup?

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

#112

Post by AndrewDucker »

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?

What UI would you use with it that runs on all platforms?

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

#113

Post by Someone »

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

You can get closer by limiting the depth and breadth of the API, for example by using VT100 and the I/O operations from the C standard library.

That is ‘a bit’ minimalistic, but it is “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_ […] Would not even have to be an entire API”, and it could run on hardware that has no chance to run Win32.

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

#114

Post by andybak »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #100
swatcoder wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platform innovation requires control over your own API, because you want to expose the features and architectures that make your platform excel and that weren’t accounted for in abstracted tools. There will always be incompatible native API’s. Meanwhile, a ton of apps and games are completely agnostic to those cutting edge platform differences and are going to thrive in least common denominator sandboxes. And making…

> Platform innovation requires control over your own API, because you want to expose the features and architectures that make your platform excel and that weren’t accounted for in abstracted tools. Yeah, I’m not buying that. It’s the story they tell you of course, but I think that’s a marketing lie. Let’s be clear first that hardware is the platform. Your comment seems to agree with that. Note that for quite a long t…

Both things can be true.

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

#115

Post by Kiro »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #40
Kiro wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're talking about software and apps in general, not games. 99% of game developers do not use web technologies.

cough Switch cough

Do you mean games or their UI? Or do you mean that people are not using web due to Switch not being a valid target? No idea how the platform works.

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

#116

Post by oli-g »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #112
oli-g wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What UI would you use with it that runs on all platforms?

For desktop, Avalonia, hands down.

https://avaloniaui.net/

Open source, powered by Skia, backed by JetBrains, and quite battle-tested at this point for small to medium-sized apps. In theory perfectly capable for enterprise as well, since it's basically a spiritual successor to WPF, which has been an industry standard for about 15 years.

They're diving into mobile and WASM well, but that's more of a recent effort and I haven't tested that yet.

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

#117

Post by nine_k »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #72
lmm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. A native ABI doesn't mean you have to use C++ though. I can use Qt from Python if I like, or even from the JVM (slightly fiddlier, but doable). I can't do that with the browser. > nobody distributed them for free, as Netscape did with the browser. They also not…

> A native ABI doesn't mean you have to use C++ though. I can use Qt from Python if I like, or even from the JVM (slightly fiddlier, but doable). I can't do that with the browser. wasm is that ABI for browser. Yes it would make everything bit slower, but I am fine given a lot more added security.

Funnily, if you look at memory consumption of a Qt app, especially a PyQT app, sometimes it can easily compare to that of an Electron app.

(No, not all of them, of course.)

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

#118

Post by nine_k »

lmm wrote: post #73
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A native ABI doesn't mean you have to use C++ though. I can use Qt from Python if I like, or even from the JVM (slightly fiddlier, but doable). I can't do that with the browser. wasm is that ABI for browser. Yes it would make everything bit slower, but I am fine given a lot more added security.

If we reach the point where a WASM-only app is a first-class citizen and I can write an app that doesn't have to touch HTML/CSS/JS (doing the UI with canvas or whatever), I'll be happy. We're not there yet though.

See where Google Flutter is heading.

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

#120

Post by Capricorn2481 »

cageface wrote: post #84
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…

Flutter is actually pretty close to this right now. I'm building an app that targets Windows, Mac, iOS and Android and so far it's working really well on all of them with more than 90% code reuse. If Google doesn't give up on it I think it's going to be a much better stack for cross platform applications than the browser is.

> If Google doesn't give up on it I think it's going to be a much better stack for cross platform applications than the browser is.

When I read this, I don't know if you're saying it's not ready yet or something. Is it close but not there yet? Do you experience bugs?

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