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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

#181

Post by et1337 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #169
et1337 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does high-DPI support work if you put the right declaration in your executable's manifest? Specifically: true/pm

Thanks, yeah I tried something equivalent to this (SetProcessDpiAwareness, as mentioned by another commenter). It broke some other SDL stuff though. I'm just gonna have to screw around with it when release time comes.

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

#182

Post by shmerl »

pjmlp wrote: post #179
shmerl wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again, you don't seem to understand how the industry works. Economics work as usual here and gaming industry is no exception. If someone forces duplication of work on others, that increases costs, which ends up being passed to some party. And for the end user it can translate in lower availability, slower time to the market, higher prices and so on. So far you didn't manage to demonstrate that it somehow magically…

My whole point was to say how the industry works and that professional game developers, important word here professional not indie, don't care one little second about the point of view you are expressing. I do not intend to demonstrate that something, whatever it might be, magically comes for free.

> My whole point was to say how the industry works and that professional game developers, important word here professional not indie, don't care one little second about the point of view you are expressing.

You made several mistakes in that statement.

1. You claimed that only publisher funded developers are professionals, while those who are self funded or backed by other means (like investors or crowdfunding), i.e. independent (=indie) developers are not professionals. That's an insult to many truly professional people. There is no dependency on publisher funding to be a professional.

2. You assumed that publisher funded production doesn't care about this issue. Do you think they don't have to balance their budgets? Just because they are publisher funded doesn't mean they have infinite resources and doesn't mean that those publishers are happy about extra costs.

I.e. everyone cares about it and nobody normal likes it. The only ones who like lock-in are those crooked vendors who push it on everyone else. Also, if someone doesn't care about the industry progressing - they can't be called professionals.

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

#183

Post by dang »

jupp0r wrote: post #101

"but then realized I could open a term window and that I was really using a unix-like system with a user interface that wasn’t X Windows." Where would one have to hide to retain this level of ignorance for so long?

> Where would one have to hide to retain this level of ignorance for so long?

This comment breaks the HN guidelines by being both uncivil and unsubstantive (i.e. it adds no information). Please only post comments that are both civil and unsubstantive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#184

Post by pjmlp »

shmerl wrote: post #182
pjmlp wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My whole point was to say how the industry works and that professional game developers, important word here professional not indie, don't care one little second about the point of view you are expressing. I do not intend to demonstrate that something, whatever it might be, magically comes for free.

> My whole point was to say how the industry works and that professional game developers, important word here professional not indie, don't care one little second about the point of view you are expressing. You made several mistakes in that statement. 1. You claimed that only publisher funded developers are professionals, while those who are self funded or backed by other means (like investors or crowdfunding), i.e.…

Professionals, as in release AAA games.

Those are mistakes on your point of view, not mine.

Of course there are production and development costs, like in any other business, however the industry doesn't get crazy about FOSS and stuff like that.

My point of view steams from having had the opportunity to get a glimpse how the AAA game development industry works.

Have you ever been there, instead of trying to advocate for everyone cares about costs and free mantra?!

Just go attend a GDC, ask around how many devs care about your point of view.

Based on my experience attending them, I bet the answer will be very few.

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

#185

Post by interpol_p »

hungri-yeti wrote: post #141
interpol_p wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't used VS in many years, but I like what you describe. I don't know if this will be helpful, but these are my alternatives in Xcode: > For instance if you want to do a find/replace in VS you can double click on a word do Ctrl+H and the word you selected populates the search box. Your workflow sounds nicer than Xcode's here. While I don't often use find+replace, I do use project level find constantly. My muscl…

You can use Cmd+E to directly insert the selected text into the search buffer, so for the Project-Wide search you wind up with the shorter sequence: Cmd+E, Cmd+Shift+F, Return This sequence seems to work in many other apps, I don't know if it's a system command or just a common convention.

Thanks! That's really useful to know.

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

#186

Post by chii »

vvanders wrote: post #162
chii wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have written your game with a good api layer that shield you from platform specificity, I can't imagine why it would take that long to port... It's mostly SMOP

That's what most PC developers think until they hit their first Console port. Correct data organization is critical for getting this right. The PS3 was particularly brutal in this respect since it forced you to segment your computations in 256kb chunks(to fit in the SPU).

Fair point, I've never done any console dev. On the PC, it's really only code related to the way you might alloc memory, files, and some other io related tasks...

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

#187

Post by shmerl »

pjmlp wrote: post #184
shmerl wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My whole point was to say how the industry works and that professional game developers, important word here professional not indie, don't care one little second about the point of view you are expressing. You made several mistakes in that statement. 1. You claimed that only publisher funded developers are professionals, while those who are self funded or backed by other means (like investors or crowdfunding), i.e.…

Professionals, as in release AAA games. Those are mistakes on your point of view, not mine. Of course there are production and development costs, like in any other business, however the industry doesn't get crazy about FOSS and stuff like that. My point of view steams from having had the opportunity to get a glimpse how the AAA game development industry works. Have you ever been there, instead of trying to advocate f…

> Professionals, as in release AAA games.

Term AAA is ambiguous. Please define it. If you mean publisher funded (a common meaning), then see above. If you mean big budget, then your remark about independent developers is invalid as well (there are independent studios with big budget games). Anyway, I don't see how any of that is related to professionalism. Funding method or budget size has nothing to do with it.

> Of course there are production and development costs, like in any other business

Yes, overcoming lock-in and duplication of effort add extra costs. That's exactly what I was saying above. It equally affects big and small budget projects, as well as publisher funded and independent studios. Saying they don't care about extra costs is simply ignoring the reality.

> How the AAA game development industry works.

Still ambiguous, but let's assume you mean AAA = publisher funded (since you contrasted it with independent studios before).

Simple example - most legacy publishers don't even release games for multiple APIs (such as OpenGL), because of costs. I.e. they are hostages of lock-in. That exactly demonstrates the issue above, and the fact that it has a direct impact.

So saying that no one cares about it (or no one is impacted by this tax on the indstry) is completely wrong.

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

#188

Post by cerberusss »

rpc_was_taken wrote: post #81
andystanton wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding in a third option to the mix - JetBrains recently added a C++ editor to their catalogue called CLion[1]. While VS and XCode have quite a headstart over it, CLion is cross platform and comes with native support for CMake projects. JetBrains also make the (de-facto from my experience) Java IDE - IntelliJ which shares a core engine with CLion. A bugbear of mine for XCode is the absence of C++ refactoring tools, w…

If you do mainly Objective-C, JetBrains AppCode is pretty good. Refactoring tools are awesome, even though they are still working in Swift support. Code navigation et.al. are on par with other JetBrains products. Debugging works pretty fine. You still have to revert to XCode for that crap that is Interface Builder. JetBrains tried to write an IB clone inside AppCode, but they abandoned it. AppCode lets me code 80% of…

> You still have to revert to XCode for that crap that is Interface Builder

As an alternative opinion, I use Interface Builder every day to visually create my interfaces, add layout constraints to it, hook up actions to buttons and define the navigation flow of the app. I very much like the fact that I have small view controllers.

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

#189

Post by pjmlp »

shmerl wrote: post #187
pjmlp wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professionals, as in release AAA games. Those are mistakes on your point of view, not mine. Of course there are production and development costs, like in any other business, however the industry doesn't get crazy about FOSS and stuff like that. My point of view steams from having had the opportunity to get a glimpse how the AAA game development industry works. Have you ever been there, instead of trying to advocate f…

> Professionals, as in release AAA games. Term AAA is ambiguous. Please define it. If you mean publisher funded (a common meaning), then see above. If you mean big budget, then your remark about independent developers is invalid as well (there are independent studios with big budget games). Anyway, I don't see how any of that is related to professionalism. Funding method or budget size has nothing to do with it. > Of…

> Simple example - most legacy publishers don't even release games for multiple APIs (such as OpenGL), because of costs. I.e. they are hostages of lock-in. That exactly demonstrates the issue above, and the fact that it has a direct impact.

It is not how it works in the industry.

They focus on one platform, because game programming is more than the graphics API, the hardware architecture and OS are also part of the whole equation, and what means being able to extract every single byte and ms for a few extra FPS.

The talks done by Naughty Dog are a good example of how much it matters to be an expert on a specific platform.

Then they leave the ports to other game studios that specialize in porting to specific platforms, which is another way how money flows inside the industry.

There is a whole industry specialized in game ports since the days of Atari ruled the world.

A publisher that targets PC, XBOX, PS4 and Nintendo has already by definition supported 4 graphical APIs, not counting the additional OS and hardware differences.

You can shout to the windmills how much bad lock-in and duplication of efforts are, like it happened to Don Quixote, no one will care until you change the speech to the language and mentality that reigns in the game industry.

What matters is IP, licenses and getting the games into the hands of users.

The technology used comes a few bullet points down in the priority list.

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