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All file formats are platform agnositc, as long as you have code that can read them.



Which was the entire point of my post. MED would not have any major changes (other than switching from a DirectX display to an OpenGL display...and most would agree that OpenGL is much easier for toolsets anyway), nor would the MDL format. Same goes for WED and SED. So Wladimir Stolipin and Gustav Nordvall would not really have any change in their work (other than the DirectX to OpenGL switch).

Physics is physics, and by and large does not have any direct dependancies on DirectX or OpenGL. There are some optimizations to be made, but by and large it will be a simple switch (especially when you take into account that there are a lot of apps using ODE and OpenGL already). The map compiler may prove problematic depending on how it is written - but there is a good chance that it could already be compiled as is to run on Linux or OSX (with the exception mainly of GUI aspects). So Marco's workload should be impacted only slightly.

C-Script need not have any changes done at all since it hooks to the engine. Doug can therefore keep plugin along on template scripts.

The engine and the Script compiler, JCL and Volker Kleipa respectively, are the only things which I could foresee needing major rewrites. And if done properly the changes can be totally transparent to the user base (for that matter they could release A7 as an OpenGL based engine).

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While pre-selling a Mac version of the software might sound like a good idea, it enters the whole world of "vaporware". Conitec fought hard against even having a "Forecast" list. It would be very hard to convince us to take money for a software product we haven't even started on...



That opinion in my mind would make me leary of putting $50K up for development costs. If you are not willing to take $1000 from 50 customers who are interested in a cross platform engine, why would it be any easy to take $50K from a single individual (company or otherwise)? Also in finding 50 willing participants it would seem to me to be a better indicator of the potential market than a single development house.

With 3DGS's apparent user base it would seem like the way to go. As opposed to waiting for a single user that is.

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Also, think of it from the indie perspective. If I'm going to spend my time and money on a product, do I want to deploy it on a computer system that has maybe 1% of the audience that windows has? Take Action Bird and Biyu Biyu...after all the time and sweat and money invested in it and for as excellent as those games look, if deployed on a mac it's exposure would be minimal and that would be a shame.



From the developers stand point Macs are actually the better market, however from Conitec's position I think it would be a hard sell. Due to the limited market of Macs very few games ever actually make it to the Mac - so you have much less competition...even from AAA titles. Where there might be 500+ adventure games released each year for Windows you might have 10 for Macs - so it is much easier to get the front page exposure than it would be when competing against those 500+ games. That and if you have a cross platform engine you will get to compete against the 500+ Windows only games as well as the 10 or so Mac games.

The bigger question though is not how it pans out for us, the developers, but for Conitec since for them it is not really a matter of how many games will be sold but how many Mac users they will pick up in porting the engine.

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