Making games for Mac...

[Nooners]

Speaking as someone who primarily uses a Mac, and wishes I could play my major games like Oblivion and Bad Company 2, how hard is it from a technical standpoint for publishers/developers to retool a game to work on both Windows and Mac? I know that budget and potential market and cost and all that is the primary concern, but from a purely technical standpoint, how hard is it to make such a conversion?

 

[ShifterChaos]

In theory, its not all that hard. As a guy who's still studying C++, ObjectiveC and Java, just to name a few languages, you could possibly recode using some from of "Find/Replace". Unfortunately, and realistically, there are some very major differences between developing for the two OS', not to mention that if the documentation was done poorly, any one would have a tough time figuring out what they were doing. So, yes, it could be done, but not as easily as you might think, and most likely not as profitable either. Hope that helps some!

 

[Javarock]

Don't know... But it seems both your examples were primarly made for consoles. Therefor if there target audiance is those they just have there ported copy of the pc for just one platform beacuse they don't feel like makeing a port to mac? And the fact at least from what I have seen/Heard more people use the PC.

 

[penguindude42]

OBJECTION!

Only real PCs can play games!

/thread

~tom

 

[Zhukov]

That's what Boot Camp is for.

*goes back to playing Mass Effect 2 on iMac.*

 

[Cpt. Red]

Graphics side it mostly depends on if the PC version uses DirectX or OpenGL. If it's DirectX then they will pretty much need to redo a big part of the graphics code. Otherwise it's somewhat easier. The fact is that Mac doesn't have a big enough of userbase to warrant the cost of a port.

Also as a side note the biggest problem with is that OpenGL have a somewhat uneven support and minor language differences between different hardware suppliers.

 

[oplinger]

On a technical standpoint? A *****. As you can imagine...Macs don't use DirectX. DirectX is pretty much the most widely used API. OpenGL is used...but definitely not so much. switching the renderer from DX to OGL is just not that easy.

From the get go however, if you have both in mind, it's not an issue, ans you can usually program the game in a language that can output to both.