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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

#61

Post by stevetrewick »

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've been using XCode daily since version 3 and I still miss VS. XCode (IMO) is a festival of UX badness - can't change positions of navigator windows, can't change fonts/colors outside of source/console, the 'assistant' window (or whatever it's called this week) frequently opens up unexpected or unrelated files, refuses to stop trying to automatically balance square brackets, spews truncated errors and warnings over the top of code then shows a tiny version in a mouseover for about 3 seconds before hiding it, truncates said warnings in the issue navigator, tiny fonts almost everywhere, severe weirdness with variable inspection and no integrated 'watch' in the debugger - which likes to show disassembley even when you ask it not to.

Lack of refactoring support for Swift is currently baking my noodle, as is the lack of a supported plugin API (with which I could solve many of my own problems). Very crashy.

All that being said, it has a lot of good stuff. The analysis and profiling tools are great, there's a bunch of really powerful tools for games and 3D, view debugging is a thing now, the UI builder is super powerful (once you get used to it) and the unit/performance/UI testing tools are (IMO) pretty awesome. Lately integration with all things App Store (provisioning, entitlements, etc) has got a lot better and most of my pain points there have gone away.

It's hugely subjective though, some people would disagree with much of this. Like any IDE, you end up in a love/hate relationship. The main difference being that if you hate VS you can hit up the extensibility API and make your pain go away, whereas Apple don't really care if you hate them.*

*I'm aware of Alcatraz and it's neat, I'm just not quite sure I want to introduce unsupported hackery into my production environment.

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

#62

Post by raverbashing »

ahoka wrote: post #54
collyw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this atually mean (when compared to Linux, which is a UNIX clone)? That they have paid someone for a certificate? Is it more than that?

Yes, it means that someone payed money for a useless certificate. Nothing more, nothing less. BTW, Linux is UNIX too! http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3596.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspur_K-UX

Yes, the certificate is useless

Unfortunately some people will only sign big cheques if the given useless certificate is present

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

#63

Post by citruspi »

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…

> Xcode doesn't even have file tabs, but sth. I'd describe as big "whole-UI-tabs"

Preferences → Navigation → Double Click Navigation → Uses Separate Tab

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

#64

Post by yeureka »

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 on a regular basis, VS for my job and XCode for hobby work.

I prefer VS because it performs better when editing and navigating the code base ( it is actually faster to run in it inside VirtualBox than XCode natively ).

Also VS has code navigation and editing features that XCode lacks. 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. You can then populate the replace box with what you have in the clipboard or just type in what you want. In XCode you need to copy the word to replace into the clipboard, do a Cmd+F, paste the word into the search box and then type in the replace box. This is much slower.

In VS you can setup bookmarks in your code with Ctrl+F2 and jump between bookmarks by pressing F2. This is great when you need to have present multiple parts of the code base to accomplish some task. I don't know how to do this in XCode.

In VS you have a stack of source code windows that you can easily move about via Ctrl+W+n where n is the stack depth. This is incredibly useful to navigate between multiple files. Again, I don't know how to this without using the mouse in XCode.

Then there are other issues with XCode mentioned by other comments like the incredibly confusing build settings and the instability of the IDE.

I often wonder if Apple actually uses it to develop their software.

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

#66

Post by diqu »

skrebbel wrote: post #57
skrebbel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know whether he did the graphics too? It's not world class art, but it looks real good, so I'd be very impressed if that was the same guy too .

Answering my own question, the sidebar on the right says: > Shining Rock Software has only a single developer doing all the software development, artwork, and audio. I'm blown away. Really cool.

He used to be a console engine dev, so - naturally - he wrote even that from scratch. On his own. Quite admirable, I think.

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

#67

Post by DeveloperExtras »

I do it this way, but it's based on my particular skill set:

First make the iOS version. Then, port it over to Java. Then, port it over to C# or maybe ActionScript3/Flash.

This way, I can recursively update previous versions as the 'best solution' to interesting problems become most clear by the end of the 2nd or 3rd port. This gives the Objective-C/iOS version the attention it needs, and I can use the rapid application development features for each new port.

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

#68

Post by andystanton »

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…

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, which CLion certainly has.

[1]: https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/

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

#69

Post by mattmanser »

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.

It's an absorbing simcity-esque game, as long as you don't go in expecting Civ/SimCity replay value it's definitely worth it if you like those type of games, or at the very least putting on your wishlist for the steam winter sale.

The level of quality for a one-person team is phenomenal.

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

#70

Post by tychuz »

sitharus wrote: post #23
archagon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use VS but I use Xcode every day. Downsides: incredibly laggy, buggy, can crash a lot depending on the version. Upsides: actually pretty thoughtful in terms of UI and UX, at least insofar as a fully-fledged IDE can be. I could never wrap my head around VS's stupid toolbars. Debugging, when it works, is really nice; there's more interactivity and inline code interaction than I remember VS having. (VS probably…

Laggy and buggy? That sounds like Visual Studio to me and I use that 8 hours a day. However, it's a damn good environment for C# and F# development, and Intellisense is pretty awesome in 2015. In VS, Control-; is a pretty good way to navigate. I turn off all the toolbars anyway.

>In VS, Control-; is a pretty good way to navigate.

Not for me. ReSharper's "Go to Everything" is so much better.

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