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Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X

shiningrocksoftware.com

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Re: Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X

#151

Post by swinglock »

et1337 wrote: post #111
picozeta wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Furthermore SDL2 is absolutely fantastic and just works. You may say, you do not want to use it as it "just" abstracts away keyboard/mouse/controller input, window and GL context creation but these things are damn hard to get right.

As a current SDL2 user: it is not fantastic and it does not just work. - On Windows, DPI scaling is broken (ask for a 1280x720 window, get 1600x900) - On Mac, mouse locking is broken - On Linux, my Xbox gamepads don't work at all - Required several hacks before it could be used as a CMake submodule This stuff is under active development, which is shocking for such an established and widespread library. I'm glad it ex…

Looks like it really is damn hard to get right.

Re: Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X

#153

Post by shurcooL »

SXX wrote: post #74

I’m not using SDL or any other library to hide those platform differences. Once start working on Linux port he'll regret about that. Every developer that start with own platform-specific code end up using SDL2 anyway. Don't do that mistake.

Before going with SDL2, I'd highly suggest evaluating it compared to GLFW.

Re: Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X

#154

Post by eco »

flohofwoe wrote: post #31
stinos wrote: post #2

Xcode isn’t too bad. I wish the author told me more about it than just this. Can somebody comment on how it compares to recent VS editions these days? About 5 years ago I also looked into using OSX as main OS. As I've always been using non-commandline graphic text editors and IDEs for most coding that made XCode the go-to environment but I just couldn't deal with it even though I tried. I don't remember all details b…

I use both VS and Xcode daily. Once you get over the initial "gee this thing looks like iTunes" shock and get used to a few small annoyances, Xcode is quite ok to work with. Keyboard shortcuts and source file navigation are completely different to anything else though, once you get used to it, it works well though. Where Xcode is better than Visual Studio for C/C++ dev (IMHO of course): - C++ compiling and linking is…

This matches my own experience quite closely. Good list.

There is a lot of head scratching with XCode project configuration (for me at least). It's very unintuitive.

clang (though XCode) is much, much faster compiling my projects than cl.exe (through VS) even though I'm using precompiled headers in the Windows build and no PCH on the clang build. VS2015 is supposedly much faster but I still have a few compilation issues I need to work through before I can switch to it.

The debugging experience on Visual Studio is much more pleasant.

Re: Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X

#155

Post by shmerl »

pjmlp wrote: post #136
shmerl wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is pointless if you are limited to a MS only walled garden. Also, rushing it out ahead just to be first isn't a plus if it has deficiencies that could be fixed before the release. Vulkan is developed with reasonable pace and it's good that they aren't trying to rush it out before it's ready.

Professional game developers don't have any issues with walled gardens. That is how the industry has survived the 1983 crash due to race to bottom quality.

> Professional game developers don't have any issues with walled gardens.

That's nonsense. Tell them that doing double work is a good thing (especially for the limited budget). No sane developer likes walled gardens and lock-in because it always translates in complications (not caused by real technical reasons), and doing the same work multiple times to address stupidity of vendors who push said lock-in.

> That is how the industry has survived

Saying that industry survives on lock-in is like saying that technology survives on the lack of progress. I.e. it's a completely backwards thinking.

Re: Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X

#156

Post by cam- »

farresito wrote: post #88
lucozade wrote: post #80

> Apparently my vi command muscle memory hasn't faded. Back in the day I did most of my dev work on Solaris. I then spent 4 years as CTO as a startup that was pretty much only Windows. When I subsequently went back to working at a unix shop I was initially struggling with vi as I tried to read some of the C++ code. I couldn't remember commands, was having to refer to the man pages every few mins. It was torture. A co…

This always happens to me with passwords. I have trouble remembering some passwords. Yet, when I'm in front of the page and I actually need to get in, either I lose some focus and let my unconsciousness do the work or I won't get it right.

There is the (internet) story of an engineer that could only log in when he was sitting down. Standing up he could not login.

The problem was he had cleaned his keyboard a couple of days earlier and put some keys back wrong. When he was sitting down he logged in by touch typing. Standing up he looked at his keyboard when he typed.

Re: Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X

#157

Post by tpush »

ahoka wrote: post #132
pjmlp wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all APIs provided by all Linux distributions fully support the POSIX specification to the smallest detail?

Maybe after some nonsense like "export POSIXLY_CORRECT" and defining a few macros.

"POSIX_ME_HARDER"

Re: Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X

#158

Post by exprx »

jblow wrote: post #142
SXX wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately most of game developers that decide against use of SDL2 do that based on their experience of Windows development where it's pretty much standard to have own code for everything (except development tools and some middleware). E.g they think that their own code going to take less lines and be cleaner than SDL. As result these people usually don't even consider any alternatives as all of them even worse fr…

... And those developers are generally right. I would use SDL in Linux ports of things because it is the closest to a reasonable native API on Linux (which says more about Linux than SDL actually). But even having done so I would then use native APIs in Windows, OSX, etc. If your standard of quality is high enough, it won't really be possible to reach it using a blanket API like SDL everywhere.

Nothing on the post above is even remotely accurate.

Re: Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X

#159

Post by pjmlp »

ahoka wrote: post #132
pjmlp wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all APIs provided by all Linux distributions fully support the POSIX specification to the smallest detail?

Maybe after some nonsense like "export POSIXLY_CORRECT" and defining a few macros.

Which means it isn't actually a proper UNIX out of the box.
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