THANK GOD!!!

--Mike

And now for something completely different...

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As someone who has no desire to port to Mac, I would be concerned as to what this would do to the actual win 3DGS engine development. Seems like this would spread the 3DGS team a bit thin, push back A7 release, etc....

They could hire an outside team to do it I guess, but the est. $50k price tag doesn't seem like enough for that...

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That is why I was curious what the larger picture would be. Quite likely you would not have a dedicated Windows engine and a dedicated OSX engine - it would be a cross platform engine (and could very well be A7 or A8). Much of the development would not be affected, except of course the vast majority of JCLs work. Physics will operate more or less the same. Formats are not dependant on DirectX or OpenGL (you can even load X files in OpenGL). C-Script would not even have to change at all - since it doesn't run alone, it hooks to the engine. The only changes would be to the core engine...which is what JCL works on, apparently by himself. Granted it would be a lot of changes - but most of them can be made transparent to Windows users (other than clarities sake - you wouldn't even need to change things like the D3D_* commands).

Anywho, it would be interesting to know what a Mac port would really mean to the engine - beyond just operating on OSX.

Taking into consideration things JCL has mentioned before, like seperating the engine, renderer, and scripting into seperate pieces, make it more feasable down the road to offer more x-platform possiblities. If the same thing was done for other pieces like audio, then using OpenAL instead of DirectSound would be a possiblity as well. Same with OpenGL as a renderer.

With regards to formats, I know first hand the the code to do this is not quite portable. The reason for it is that the structs have padding in them that is written out to the files, and this means they are doing serialization by simply writing out the struct directly from memory. This wont work on other platforms since things like structure alignment and byte order may be different.

The code to open the files is not portable - but there is nothing in any file format that restricts them to use on a specific platform. You may find that a file format that is currently being used is not optimum for a different platform - but it will still work.

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what's next from you... lines from the Three Stooges TV series!!!

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Just to save the reputation of the poor Stooges and to lighten this up a bit, they never had a TV series....well in live action form, anyway.

First, lay off the personal attacks. This is a developer forum, not fark.com. If you want to impress people by beating each other up, do it somewhere else. <subject ends at this point, if you have questions send me a PM or email *Don't post it here!*>

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...

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Seems like this would spread the 3DGS team a bit thin ...

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It would spread the current team very thin. This goes back to my "limited time and money" point. We would have to hire at least one new person or...

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They could hire an outside team to do it I guess, but the est. $50k price tag doesn't seem like enough for that...

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Maybe. Again, the $50k price tag is just a guess at this point (remember I said *not* to quote me on that ). In house or 3rd party, I'm sure we would end up spending a lot more then $50k. The hope is that it would be enough to get started.

i agree with qwerty's approach on this... abstracting the layers of code would make portability an easier prospect... and could be gradually coded into the engine while the HAL interface for the various platforms is thought out and coded...

... thus allowing for a smooth and uninterrupted transition.


--Mike

Another reason why I wouldn't like to see 3DGS ported is that in my mind, the current 3DGS users would likely be sharing in the cost of development and release; passing on the loses onto us as it where. Given that in everyones mind it would be an uphill battle, I could see the win version bumped up a few (hundred) dollars to make up for the initial period where 3DGS/mac is entering the market. I suppose that is why they would rather do it with outside investors rather than spend their own money on it.

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.

No matter how you cut it, it just doesn't make good business sense for either Conitec or its current and future customers.

For me this falls in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" category. The acknex engine has been around for a decade exclusively on windows and so far so good. While there is a potential for Conitec to be a small fish in a small pond, a small pond just doesn't have that much food and I'd like to think that conitec is hungrier than that.

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Again, the $50k price tag is just a guess at this point (remember I said *not* to quote me on that ).

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Well I did put "est." and darn it, you are just so damn quotable!!!!