Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X

#1

Post by levifig » Wed, Nov 11, 2015, 6:32 AM UTC

Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X
shiningrocksoftware.com

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

#2

Post by stinos » Wed, Nov 11, 2015, 7:48 AM UTC

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 but in general it just felt inferior to VS on like all fronts, with no advantages of any kind (for C++). Again, IIRC, but it did annoying things like opening the same document in multiple windows, one for editing and one for debugging or so? Anyway, what's the state today?

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

#3

Post by trymas » Wed, Nov 11, 2015, 7:48 AM UTC

For me the most interesting part (and answer to it) why on OS X the game runs at 1FPS, whereas on windows machine with the same graphics card it runs just fine?

What can make such considerable difference?

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

#4

Post by anton_gogolev » Wed, Nov 11, 2015, 7:50 AM UTC

Tangentially related: Banished is higly recommended. Quiet room, couple glasses of whiskey and you're guaranteed to have a nice evening.

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

#5

Post by trymas » Wed, Nov 11, 2015, 7:50 AM UTC

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…

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.

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

#6

Post by shmerl » Wed, Nov 11, 2015, 7:51 AM UTC

I'd be more interested in his experience about porting to Linux (since supposedly he is working on it as well).

OpenGL on OS X is still behind the times, and so far it's not even clear if Apple will add Vulkan support when it will come out.

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

#7

Post by sitharus » Wed, Nov 11, 2015, 7:57 AM UTC

trymas wrote: post #3

For me the most interesting part (and answer to it) why on OS X the game runs at 1FPS, whereas on windows machine with the same graphics card it runs just fine? What can make such considerable difference?

Drivers. On MacOS they tend to be a bit behind the Windows versions, also MacOS itself is reasonably GPU-heavy. Add to that Apple's tendency to lag behind the latest (as in from the last five years) OpenGL standards and you've got a recipe for slow OpenGL.

Though interesting that it's an Iris Pro, MacOS used to have the best Intel drivers as Apple pulled them in-house. ATI and NVidia have always treated MacOS as a secondary target.

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

#8

Post by beachstartup » Wed, Nov 11, 2015, 7:57 AM UTC

trymas wrote: post #3

For me the most interesting part (and answer to it) why on OS X the game runs at 1FPS, whereas on windows machine with the same graphics card it runs just fine? What can make such considerable difference?

drivers.

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

#9

Post by jasonjei » Wed, Nov 11, 2015, 7:58 AM UTC

trymas wrote: post #5

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…

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 Eclipse) compiles your code as you type, leaving you no surprises until you need to link...

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

#10

Post by shmerl » Wed, Nov 11, 2015, 7:58 AM UTC

trymas wrote: post #3

For me the most interesting part (and answer to it) why on OS X the game runs at 1FPS, whereas on windows machine with the same graphics card it runs just fine? What can make such considerable difference?

OpenGL on OS X has platform specific quirks which can require using different methodology. Linux developers of Witcher 2 (from VirtualProgramming) stumbled on various parallelism issues when trying to port their OS X version of eON wrapper to Linux. See https://github.com/virtual-programming/witcher2-linux/issues...

To put it shortly - you can't just assume "it's all OpenGL so same code will work the same".