Questions about Linux & Mac

[PJJ]

Dear developers and Micro Prose Software,

Way it is not planned to develop your software continuously on all OS? Why this kind of resist? Why discriminating all other OS? Why being unfair and support Microsoft only? Are you paid by Microsoft to block all other OS?

In the 90’s games appears on Amiga, Atari, C64 and MS-Dos. I Would appreciate to find back to Micro Prose on Linux and Mac OS native games. Thankfully for the childhood I had on Amiga with your games.

[Mors]

Originally posted by PJJ:

Dear developers and Micro Prose Software,

Way it is not planned to develop your software continuously on all OS? Why this kind of resist? Why discriminating all other OS? Why being unfair and support Microsoft only? Are you paid by Microsoft to block all other OS?

While I would agree to get the game for Linux and OS X as well, and Unity makes it possible. It is question about developer own knowledge how to actually port the code for those systems.

[PJJ]

I understand this. But It should be a standard. It seems that the 90's have more effort to knowledge and rise starndards as the developers today. I would appreciate it to keep such an effort of the past and open up for knowledge and rise wisdom again.

thanks in advance!

[Mors]

It would be nice to hear that developer keeps that option, without decide not to. As it as well means support for steam deck...

[Perfect Info]

Not the developer of this game, but I do development on business code.

Cross-platform development is definitely becoming easier than ever. I'm lead to understand that Unity in particular tries to accomplish for games what .NET Core / .NET 5+ does for moving Windows development cross platform—specifically, to provide the ability to code once on an abstraction of hardware and operating system interfaces and trust that code to run successfully any supported environment. There are also developments in automated testing and deployment pipelines to facilitate consistent cross-platform deployment experiences without adding more deployment overhead to developers for each platform supported. So when you have the means to support cross-platform, why wouldn't you?

Well, there are still reasons not to do that! The one that I think is most applicable to game development, particularly public alpha/beta development, is that "more environments are more variables to control for." Even if the code base is easy to compile for Windows, OS X, Linux variants, etc, and even if Unity "promises" everything will just work the same, they really won't all work the same in practice.

Take something as simple as, "If the game crashes during the public alpha, please copy and paste the log file into the thread so I can see what caused the crash." Well, the player needs to know where to find the log files. But if they are located in "C:\Users\YourName\AppData\LocalLow\TinyCombat\Arena\" on Windows, where are they located on Linux? On OS X? Unity is just saving them in the location that the operating system tells it is reserved for "user-level files generated by applications", but each operating system has its own opinion on where that is! So now maybe 10-20% of your bug report threads need to run through an extra step of, "Okay, which OS are you on?... In that case, find the log files here..." On top of any errors that are peculiar to a different operating system.

So even if you could easily compile the code to another operating system with no extra effort (perhaps even the default settings are to do that automatically!), the developer/publisher might actually make the deliberate decision to release only on one operating system, or to only host the public alpha/beta on one operating system.

That doesn't mean they necessarily will never support only one operating system. It may be that they have a development timeline that places "cross platform support" at a latter stage of development, to sort out the other features first before adding the complexity of fixing them all to work with every other platform.

Also, "lol" at the idea of being paid by Microsoft to be platform-exclusive. While that did happen more commonly in the past, these days platform-publishers will soft-compete for platform-exclusives by offering development "supports." E.g. "We have the most thoroughly documented software development kit out of all the platforms! Choose us to avoid hassles struggling with obscure bugs!" "Our console supports next-generation graphics API's that no other competitor has! Choose us to unlock better graphics that will help sell your title!" Instead of shovelling money to a single developer and hoping they produce a blockbuster that sells platforms, they can spend the money once to create a benefit that all prospective developers will find attractive. Cast a wide net instead of dangling an expensive hook and getting it caught on a boot.