Engine design question

Well by implementing both you give the user the opportunity to port their apps to other platforms. That is assuming you have supported the other platforms as well. I think it's good to give the end user as many options as possible so they can get the engine running as they want for their program.

That depends on who your end-users are. For most commercial games supporting both would be a waste of time since Windows is their only platform anyway and their game could be delayed for something which wouldn't benefit the end-user. However for a third-party graphics engine intended to reach the indie development community support for both would be a big advantage. Generally I'd say that for middleware supporting both would be a good idea, but definitely not required, and for an engine for a specific project it would be a waste of resources.

Ask yourself how are you and your users going to benefit from this and what would it cost you in terms of time and resources? For a modern AAA FPS game a 6-month delay would be totally unacceptable and the technology may even be old by then.

Quote:

Original post by CTar That depends on who your end-users are. For most commercial games supporting both would be a waste of time since Windows is their only platform anyway and their game could be delayed for something which wouldn't benefit the end-user. However for a third-party graphics engine intended to reach the indie development community support for both would be a big advantage. Generally I'd say that for middleware supporting both would be a good idea, but definitely not required, and for an engine for a specific project it would be a waste of resources. Ask yourself how are you and your users going to benefit from this and what would it cost you in terms of time and resources? For a modern AAA FPS game a 6-month delay would be totally unacceptable and the technology may even be old by then.

I think that is a really good point. The engine is for a project and making it support everything under the sun would just burn resournces. Thanks for the help

Another alternative would be to use OpenGL with a cross platform framework like SDL, that way you support pretty much anyone regardless of OS.