I’m not using “ignorant” as a pejorative here. But goddamn would I kill for that to change, and for me to be able to run games on my Mac some day. I get that the Mac is a poor platform for gaming development. I struggle to find any redeeming qualities of Windows as a user. He often has posts explaining why $thing works some unexpected way or has some sharp edge, and the answer is always because thirty years ago a team at Microsoft built something insane and convoluted (admittedly through the lens of someone watching today), it’s now baked in at the lowest levels of Windows, and it can’t be touched, changed, or removed because of their commitment to backward compatibility. To top it all off, I am continually just floored whenever I read Raymond Chen’s blog. Everything’s UI seems to have been built with entirely custom components designed by a color-blind child who’s seen too many sci-fi movies. For all the complaints about the Mac App Store, the Windows Store is-as best I can tell-bordering 100% crapware with no way to find anything of reasonable quality. Everyone wants to hijack the right-click menu. This is before I even get to what awful citizens of the platform their developers are. Everything prompts constantly-usually with modal windows-for absolutely pointless decisions (and no I’m not talking about UAC). The OS itself is a complete clusterfuck of half-new, half-old, half-ancient things like the Control Panel. USB device power management is abysmal, and devices often just won’t wake up after sleep. Fullscreen Direct3D games can freeze in a way that obscures all other windows, including the Task Manager, preventing you from ever killing them. You can’t swap sound outputs while an application is running. I hate it to the point where I can’t understand why anyone would voluntarily subject themselves to Windows other than sheer ignorance. On the flip side, I have and maintain a Windows computer for the sole purpose of gaming. The main thing that comes to mind with non-Android Linux is library versions, since those do occasionally break backwards compatibility, but this shouldn't matter too much if you're compiling static executables, or using some isolated runtime like the one Steam (IIRC) provides.Īs a point of comparison here, World of Goo's Linux version came out in 2009, and it still works on my system (Slackware64-current) which - while not at the absolute most bleeding edge - is still using library and driver and kernel versions substantially more recent than most "LTS" distro releases. Out of curiosity, what exactly were your struggles with Linux/Android backwards compatibility? Considering how many apps I run still on my phone still use Gingerbread-era UIs, and how Linux executables from as far back as the mid-90's are supposed to be able to run on even the absolute latest kernel (Linus Torvalds having publicly chewed people out on the LKML for breaking said backwards-compatibility), it's surprising that these would somehow be classified as not having solid backwards compatibility. > Notice how of the above list everyone except Linux and Android have solid back compat stories. All further games I work on do not get MacOS ports for these reasons. The horrible sales numbers meant carrying forward support was a net drag on the game. We shipped TINY METAL on MacOS, the lack of cross build delayed the release. If you do not support Metal, then you are forced to support these old intel integrated GPUs with bonus hacked up OpenGL drivers.Īll points are ones I am speaking from experience on. Apple's install base is almost all integrated older intel GPUs. Now you have to tune your game to run on hardware which would put cheap Wal-Mart machines to the test. Supposing you've decided to ignore all the downsides, and the small upside still appeals to you. Steve Jobs disliked games, it shows in Apple's support.ĥ. Platforms with such low sales, like Stadia, might be support provided the platform owner pays porting costs.Ĥ. "What are you talking about! Linux is 1% while Mac is a whole 4%!", nope! Those numbers are the same insignificance per a video game business plan. Mac users make up a share of sales similar to Linux. So a 7 year period of support after inital build machine setup is expected, anything less is going to get your platform side lined.ģ. Video games are in development for 2-3 years, and stay on the market for 5+ years with no planned recompiles. Notice how of the above list everyone except Linux and Android have solid back compat stories. Shifting sand of non-backwards compatibility. We can compile to Windows, Linux, Android, Switch, PS4, Xbox One all from one windows build machine.Ģ. Speaking from experience the issues are:ġ. Mac is a horrible platform to support for video game developers.
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