Age Of Wonders III Is Still Being Ported To Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Age Of Wonders III Is Still Being Ported To Linux

The Age of Wonders III turn-based strategy game that was released back in March is still in the process of being ported to Linux and OS X. Developers are hopeful this well-received game will be released for the non-Windows platforms later this year...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTc1MTA

[zanny]

Why the hell do they even write these games for DX in the first place if they are going to immediately port them to OpenGL? Everyone does it and it makes negative infinity sense. Write the engine once, in a cross platform way, and damn the shitty monoplatform proprietary api. How is it economically advantageous to waste thousands of developer hours at least rewriting the same thing twice? Because they already do it for consoles or something?

[mlau]

Why the hell do they even write these games for DX in the first place if they are going to immediately port them to OpenGL?

the dx (=windows) market is obviously much much larger, and their developers are most familiar with it too. there are also time and budget constraints
to consider and now they obviously have some spare time in between projects to take a look at multiplatform support. which will benefit future projects
and make porting easier.

[smitty3268]

Why the hell do they even write these games for DX in the first place if they are going to immediately port them to OpenGL? Everyone does it and it makes negative infinity sense. Write the engine once, in a cross platform way, and damn the shitty monoplatform proprietary api. How is it economically advantageous to waste thousands of developer hours at least rewriting the same thing twice? Because they already do it for consoles or something?

It takes years of development to push out a major AAA game, and years ago nobody was worried about providing linux support, or even Mac support. Windows was the only thing they cared about.

Be happy that is changing.

[zanny]

It takes years of development to push out a major AAA game, and years ago nobody was worried about providing linux support, or even Mac support. Windows was the only thing they cared about.

Be happy that is changing.

These games have been released for OSX for over half a decade now. IE, Bioshock Infinite, which has an OSX version. In every case, its a DirectX game taking thousands of developer hours to convert the engine written in DX to GL. And almost every single AAA title is seeing OSX release now. So that means, for over half a decade, development studios have been willfully writing the game first, for thousands of hours, in DX, to then spend another several thousand hours of developer time to port it to OpenGL, when they could have used OGL from the start and cut the time in half.

[smitty3268]

These games have been released for OSX for over half a decade now. IE, Bioshock Infinite, which has an OSX version. In every case, its a DirectX game taking thousands of developer hours to convert the engine written in DX to GL. And almost every single AAA title is seeing OSX release now. So that means, for over half a decade, development studios have been willfully writing the game first, for thousands of hours, in DX, to then spend another several thousand hours of developer time to port it to OpenGL, when they could have used OGL from the start and cut the time in half.

Maybe a random game or two was, but for the most part games generally were not ported to OSX back then.

And nobody wanted to mess with GL2.x anyway, especially on windows. There was talk GL wouldn't even work on Windows anymore when Vista came out.

For most big AAA games, they see a console-port anyway, which means they need a framework they can port to different systems - so adding GL and DirectX isn't that big a deal compared to just 1, since they've already got everything abstracted for the consoles anyway.

[doom_Oo7]

. And almost every single AAA title is seeing OSX release now.

A lot use wine / cider / cedega behind the scene actually : http://appleinsider.com/articles/07/...d_systems.html

[carewolf]

These games have been released for OSX for over half a decade now. IE, Bioshock Infinite, which has an OSX version. In every case, its a DirectX game taking thousands of developer hours to convert the engine written in DX to GL. And almost every single AAA title is seeing OSX release now. So that means, for over half a decade, development studios have been willfully writing the game first, for thousands of hours, in DX, to then spend another several thousand hours of developer time to port it to OpenGL, when they could have used OGL from the start and cut the time in half.

Yeah, there are almost as many games being ported to OS X as Linux now, almost.