Just Curious...

I don''t. This is interesting, I don''t think many people do! Blizzard the company makes their games compatible on two platforms. Squaresoft ports their Final Fantasy games to PC. Other than this, I think a lot of things are made with just one platform in mind though! Some games are later ported to a different OS/console, but this wouldn''t have been in the original plan ex: Doom brought to N64.

At the company i used to work they supported PC, PSX, Sega and others. There were a "common code" team that was doing AI, camera scripting and such; And for every platform there was a different group - 5-6 ppl - that was doing rendering from scratch.
This approach worked wery well, as a result games looked as good as this particular platform allowed. That convinced me that trying to make "portable rendering" is a waste of time.

When my team and I write small games just for pleasure, we normally develop for Win32 and MacOS, because most of the graphics code is identical (if you use OpenGL), and its very easy on the Macs - nice operating systems, and good quality APIs.

just my two cents..

I think when a game is coded is should be for one in mind, or at least specialized when "porting".

As in updating methods that work better on a better platform..or making them work for a ''lesser'' one.

I usually write all my modules for portabilty ease. ex...

void VIDW_Init(void)
{
   // DirectDraw Stuff
}

void VIDM_Init(void)
{
   // Quicktime stuff
}

void VID_Init(void)
{
   #ifdef WINDOWS_VERSION
   VIDW_Init();
   #endif //WINDOWS_VERSION
   #ifdef MACINTOSH_VERSION
   VIDM_Init();
   #endif //MACINTOSH_VERSION
}
 

I've never done any modules but the windows ones but if i ever had a lot of free time i'd have lots to do

Edited by - Ecco2000 on September 18, 2000 2:51:55 AM

Edited by - Ecco2000 on September 18, 2000 2:53:07 AM

I would not even think about porting graphics. This is a complete waste of time. How alike is the WinAPI\DirectX to X? I know the Mac and Windows APIs are similar, but not really that feasible to waste time porting.

Everything else though, should be perfectly portable if you so wish. It really depends on your marketing strategy and your product''s aim. If you write some game that is playable on all platforms, and one that attracts players of other platforms, go ahead make some extra bucks. But if you are making some RTS then maybe a console isn''t the best thing for it (I HATE stupid RTS games on consoles like PSX and Nintendo i.e. Red Alert, C&C, Starcraft etc.). It''s up to you, but you WILL lose money if no one wants to buy your game on whatever platform, and porting grapgics can''t be that cheap unless your programmers know every API.

Just my (Cent*4/2)



-=[ Lucas ]=-