I was wondering about this as well. I want my games to run on Mac and Linux, but I don't care about the editors. Any cross-platform developer will have a Windows PC anyway. We'd need Mac and Linux compilers, but that's it.
I'm sure jcl is getting quite bothered by this thread being bumped over and over, but... well, I was thinking about what it'd take to have Lite-C and GS work on other platforms...
A renderer rewrite, for sure. But they're already porting to Android, so they know how to deal with an OpenGL renderer.
SDL 1.2 is a stable, fast, free, low-level (within reason) layer for compiling the same code on Windows, Mac and Linux. It gives access to OpenGL, sockets, multithreading, sound, gamepads, keyboard and mouse input, all without dealing with OS-specific details. Super Meat Boy, Dwarf Fortress, Lugaru, Overgrowth, Penumbra: Overture, World of Goo, Doom 3, FreeSpace 2, Quake 4, Unreal Tournament (and 2003 and 2004), Sim City 3000, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and many other games use SDL (some of them just for the Linux or Mac version).
The compiler makes things a bit more complicated, of course. But it could also make things simpler: Lite-C is effectively C/C++ minus some really nice features users have been requesting for a while, plus wait(1) and some automatic pointer-stuff with parameters for functions. We could get the best of both worlds if Lite-C just used GCC (thus supporting all the nice C++ features if we want them) with a pre-compile stage that dealt with pointers in parameters and inserted some stack-walking function calls to provide wait(1) functionality (this is probably where I sound extremely naive
). It'd also have to rename our main function so that your main rendering/stack-building loop was being used instead of ours, of course.
Shaders, as we've mentioned before, could be compiled with Cg, which is pretty much identical to HLSL.
The last hurdle is the editors, and this is probably the biggest one since they probably rely a lot on the Windows API for all their menu shizzle. At a guess, this could be the reason we're getting GS Android and not GS Linux -- no one expects the editors to actually run on Android. But, as Superku mentioned,
we just want our games to run on other platforms, not the editors. A Linux compiler and a Mac compiler would be all we need. We're
not arguing for game dev on Mac and Linux. We're arguing for gaming on Mac and Linux. Dejobaan didn't leave to make games on Mac, they left to make games that run on Mac (to grossly simplify things).
In short, given the editors don't need to be cross-platform, and an OpenGL renderer of sorts is already in the works for Android, I believe the compiler is probably the only real obstacle between Windows-only GS and "PC gaming" GS.
