4 ms·

It's a bit easier in a game that renders its whole UI custom, though. A standard desktop app would be heavily tied to Win32 simply because of UI controls. Simil

It's a bit easier in a game that renders its whole UI custom, though. A standard desktop app would be heavily tied to Win32 simply because of UI controls. Similarly, a server app, if designed for performance, would likely be using overlapped I/O.

ryandrake 8y ago
Yea I should have qualified that I was mostly talking about games companies. Games should be among the easiest software to release on multiple platforms for to not needing platform specific UI controls. Actually I struggle to think of a single major component to a game that must be platform-specific. Yet, of all the software I use, games tend to be the ones stubbornly stuck on Windows.
- bangonkeyboard 8y ago
  > Actually I struggle to think of a single major component to a game that must be platform-specific. Different platforms often have totally different graphics APIs. Even when platforms share APIs, driver quality, compliance, and fast paths vary greatly. The Mac still used a completely different processor architecture from the PC at the time of this story, requiring platform-specific optimizations and approaches. Games, particularly cutting edge ones that demand performance, and especially from that era, are much more likely to need to be tailored to their platforms.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    These are semi-good reasons for games of the past but I thought this was actually less of a problem these days with the rise of cross-platform game engines. If you use Unity or something, porting your 2018-era game to Mac or Linux should be a recompile at most. The other thread mentions the business cost of releasing and supporting these other platforms, which I totally understand.
- justin66 8y ago
  If this story inspires you at all to troll old John Carmack .plan files and interviews, I believe you'll discover that id software stopped doing Linux versions of their games for reasons that had little to do with the technical difficulty of porting.

ryandrake 8y ago

Yea I should have qualified that I was mostly talking about games companies. Games should be among the easiest software to release on multiple platforms for to not needing platform specific UI controls. Actually I struggle to think of a single major component to a game that must be platform-specific. Yet, of all the software I use, games tend to be the ones stubbornly stuck on Windows.

bangonkeyboard 8y ago
> Actually I struggle to think of a single major component to a game that must be platform-specific. Different platforms often have totally different graphics APIs. Even when platforms share APIs, driver quality, compliance, and fast paths vary greatly. The Mac still used a completely different processor architecture from the PC at the time of this story, requiring platform-specific optimizations and approaches. Games, particularly cutting edge ones that demand performance, and especially from that era, are much more likely to need to be tailored to their platforms.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  These are semi-good reasons for games of the past but I thought this was actually less of a problem these days with the rise of cross-platform game engines. If you use Unity or something, porting your 2018-era game to Mac or Linux should be a recompile at most. The other thread mentions the business cost of releasing and supporting these other platforms, which I totally understand.
justin66 8y ago
If this story inspires you at all to troll old John Carmack .plan files and interviews, I believe you'll discover that id software stopped doing Linux versions of their games for reasons that had little to do with the technical difficulty of porting.