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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

#31

Post by flohofwoe »

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 easily 5x..10x faster out of the box than Visual Studio thanks to clang

- the static analyzer has a really nice 'arrow'-visualization of the steps that lead to the warning

- clang provides more useful error messages

- compiler warnings and errors are directly overlaid into the text editor view

- built-in support for clang address sanitizer (just a checkbox to tick)

- support for iOS development is really slick

- better out-of-the-box support for command line builds either through xcodebuild or the gcc-compatible toolchain

- Xcode comes with a lot of profiling and analysis tools where Visual Studio has only slowly caught up (but VS2015 seems to be mostly on par).

Where Xcode falls behind compared to VS:

- Xcode has that strange 'Scheme' feature for build configuration

- the debugger's variable inspection has usability issues

- working on source files with a couple thousand lines of code feels laggy

- before El Capitan, the whole UI felt slow on a Retina MBP, but I guess that's because of general optimizations in the OS

- it crashes or freezes about once or twice a week on me

- probably a number of smaller ignorances which I have learned to ignore

I usually don't touch any of the UI builder tools in both IDEs, only straight C and C++ stuff so I can't comment on the more platform-specific features.

[edit: formatting]

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

#32

Post by lhecker »

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…

My personal experience:

Visual Studio feels a lot more "enterprise-y" than Xcode and offers a lot more advanced features and tools on pretty much all fronts, especially in the UI (e.g.: Xcode doesn't even have file tabs, but sth. I'd describe as big "whole-UI-tabs"). But...

Xcode has llvm. This compiler and it's tools (i.e. the analyzer, debugger, etc.) just make VS' compiler look like it's from the 90s. Really.

-> Have you ever heard of llvm's "address sanitizer"? Forget the days of endless debugging! This little helper has revolutionized my debugging productivity and solved so many little subtile bugs for me...

So in the end you'll loose a lot of nice UI gimmicks and additional tools, but the compiler suite makes up for that.

And even if you don't need those llvm features, you still get a unix environment, which makes working on many fronts a lot easier. E.g. I'm primarely working on different kinds of web servers: To test everything I can just install whatever I need... brew, curl, netcat, wrk, ... And it will just work. And let's not forget all those "standard" unix tools like find, xargs, grep, etc.!

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

#33

Post by dickbasedregex »

curyous wrote: post #20

So he's got a working port on an OS he's never seen before, in only 1 week? Does that seem extraordinarily productive to anyone else?

It's not working. It just rendered. Like the author said, it's mostly just moving the core c++ codebase in then futzing with xcode to get it to build. If you can use *nix you can use OSX.

I'm curious about his opinions on OSX after he's gotten the game to run with sound and above 1FPS.

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

#35

Post by huhtenberg »

a_bonobo wrote: post #26
huhtenberg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the title screen, not a complete port. Nor would 1FPS be probably considered "working" :) He put the OS glue in place in 1 week and that sounds about right for this sort of effort, given some prior experience with writing portable code. The bulk of effort was spent earlier on abstracting principal code from the platform specifics, and sounds like he did all the right things there. Good stuff.

He is extremely productive, to be fair - "Shining Rock Software" is only him, the entire game, pretty successful on Steam, is just coded and maintained by him.

Oh, I agree.

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

#36

Post by Kristine1975 »

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 can only speak for Xcode 5, but after I read an article similar to http://mattorb.com/xcode-behaviors-for-fun-and-profit/ that explained how to effectively use tabs and "behaviors", I am mostly a happy camper. I also replaced its clang/libclang.dylib with a more recent build, so I could have C++14 support.

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

#37

Post by pjmlp »

lhecker wrote: post #32
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…

My personal experience: Visual Studio feels a lot more "enterprise-y" than Xcode and offers a lot more advanced features and tools on pretty much all fronts, especially in the UI (e.g.: Xcode doesn't even have file tabs, but sth. I'd describe as big "whole-UI-tabs"). But... Xcode has llvm. This compiler and it's tools (i.e. the analyzer, debugger, etc.) just make VS' compiler look like it's from the 90s. Really. -> H…

What does the modern Xcode tooling offers in regards to the 90's parallel debugger, parallel watchs, thread control, directx debugging, visualizers, code navigation, extendable security analyzers?

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

#38

Post by ossreality »

lhecker wrote: post #32
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…

My personal experience: Visual Studio feels a lot more "enterprise-y" than Xcode and offers a lot more advanced features and tools on pretty much all fronts, especially in the UI (e.g.: Xcode doesn't even have file tabs, but sth. I'd describe as big "whole-UI-tabs"). But... Xcode has llvm. This compiler and it's tools (i.e. the analyzer, debugger, etc.) just make VS' compiler look like it's from the 90s. Really. -> H…

LLVM may not remain a feature that only exists in one column soon. It's a brave new .NET world... LLILC is a thing (.NET frontend for LLVM). LLVM has a role in Android and iOS work in VS already and I think that role will only expand further.

There's a lot of attention on .NET Native. Given that LLILC went from nothing to being able to build and JIT Roslyn in 6 months...

Let's just say I have some speculation in mind.

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

#39

Post by pjmlp »

shmerl wrote: post #16
pixelHD wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have the links with me, but I've read somewhere that this happens because Windows uses DirectX, whereas OS X uses OpenGL. I assumed this is because Game Engines are built usually targeting Windows/DirectX. Some say that DirectX is more mature and powerful, although this might be subjective. And so the games perform better on Windows. FYI, With the advent of Vulkan, maybe subjective opinion that DirectX is bet…

DX12 is drawn from the same source as Vulkan (i.e. Mantle), so they aren't very different. It's just a NIH tool from MS for lock-in purposes.

With the difference that I can use it today.

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

#40

Post by Kristine1975 »

jasonjei wrote: post #9
trymas wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's just feels too heavy and laggy, though I cannot compare to VS. But I do not do much iOS/OS X GUI development, so I am happy with the terminal/vim.

I can attest that Visual Studio and Xcode can both feel laggy, especially with respect to C++ development and static analysis (Intellisense or whatever they call it). However, this may not be so much Microsoft's or Apple's fault as much as that IDE tools carry high overhead as they have to manage a lot of symbols from every header file referenced, including parameter lookups, etc. On top of that, I think Xcode (like…

Xcode checks your code as you type (90% of the time, sometimes early errors, e.g. in a header, make it give up completely on a file). Compiling still is a separate step. Current versions of VS do the same, though, even for C++.
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