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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

#71

Post by modeless »

Andrex wrote: post #53
ugh123 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron would be great if it weren't for the performance, security, configuration, and packaging issues. The latter two seem to be what OP suffered the most. html/css/js (and the frameworks on top of it) seem like a pretty low bar to build games and business logic for a variety of apps which, despite huge efforts from OP, could run on pretty much any modern platform.

It's a shame opening local HTML pages is so heavily restricted in modern browsers. I mean, I get it, but we also might not need Electron if you could stuff everything into a single HTML file and let users download that as your "app."

That's what PWAs are supposed to be. Many if not most Electron apps could and should be PWAs.

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

#72

Post by YetAnotherNick »

lmm wrote: post #51
nine_k wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would make such a platform less of a compromise than a web browser? 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. From relevant olden times, Lisp and Smalltalk environments were closest to the ideal. They were expensive though, and nobody distributed them for free, as Netscape did with the browser. They…

> 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.

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

#73

Post by lmm »

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.

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.

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

#74

Post by samanbb »

Surprised to see "Code signing with a hardened runtime is almost a must." under Steam (Mac OS). I released a game on steam and never had my distributables signed and never had a single complaint. Every player launches Steam games through Steam, and when that happens there's no need for signing.

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

#75

Post by npunt »

moritonal wrote: post #52
npunt wrote: post #9

Great read, very eye opening. > Similar to developing for macOS, a Mac is pretty much required for developing for iOS and there’s the $100 per year developer membership fee. I think the combined income of both iOS and macOS (95% of which comes from iOS) barely covers the cost of the membership fee and the cheapest Mac Mini. I think this contextualizes the post well, seems like overall revenues might be in the <$10k o…

Their MacOS revenues might have been £80k

If you read the quote, MacOS plus iOS is <$1k (cheapest mac mini + apple dev acct). Given that the article stated iOS & Android have equivalent revenue, you're looking Android+iOS+MacOS at <$1500 revenue. Its not a mobile-first game but 100k downloads suggests a single Android download is worth a penny, give or take. Brutal.

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

#77

Post by rendaw »

As the post mentions, the de-facto official way to distribute games on linux is as a windows binary run via wine/proton. AFAIK this mainly stems from issues in how linux deals with graphics drivers - you can static link everything _except_ opengl. This is similarly an issue with containerizing graphical apps: last I read you needed to have the same version graphics libraries both on the host system and _within_ the container due to the weird linking issues.

Does anyone know if there's any efforts to improve this situation? Is there some ideological issue in linux that prevents standardizing or presenting a generic interface?

(Or more background, my details are very vague here)

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

#78

Post by rendaw »

> It turns out that unless the game is explicitly marked (by Valve reviewers), Steam Deck will use the Windows build + Proton even if a Linux version is available.

I found this which sounds like it's not the default, but is in fact a result of compatibility testing:

> If your game has gone through Steam Deck compatibility testing and the testers reported that the native Linux version didn't work (because of #579), then it might have been flagged to run the Windows binaries via Proton by default, instead of the native Linux version.

per https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/issues/585

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

#79

Post by tapirl »

> All the revenue from the platform does not even cover 10% of the cheapest Mac Mini. And then there’s the $100 per year developer membership fee for notarization

Same experience for my iOS games.

Apple should more friendly for sole indie developers. (But maybe they really don't need to care about this now?)

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

#80

Post by zubairq »

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…

Could Flutter from Google be considered a good enough solution?
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