Cross platform game development make pc games for windows linux and mac

See, 3D Labs was a dying company. So, in a bid to remain relevant in a world that didn't want their products, 3D Labs showed up to a Game Developer Conference wielding presentations for something they called "OpenGL 2. Just look at how texture loading and binding work; it's semi-arcane. Part of their proposal was a shading language. However, unlike the current cross-platform ARB extensions, their shading language was "high-level" C is high-level for a shading language.

Yes, really. Now, Microsoft was working on their own high-level shading language. Which they, in all of Microsoft's collective imagination, called But their was a fundamentally different approach to the languages. The biggest issue with 3D Labs's shader language was that it was built-in. They released a compiler for it, and it generated Shader Model 2. It was a nice abstraction, but it was purely optional. And a developer always had the opportunity to go behind the compiler and tweak the output for maximum performance.

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The 3D Labs language had none of that. You gave the driver the C-like language, and it produced a shader. End of story. Not an assembly shader, not something you feed something else. The actual OpenGL object representing a shader. What this meant is that OpenGL users were open to the vagaries of developers who were just getting the hang of compiling assembly-like languages. What's worse, if you managed to get a shader to compile on multiple platforms correctly no mean feat , you were still subjected to the optimizers of the day. Which were not as optimal as they could be.

In D3D, and in the older assembly languages in OpenGL, you could mix and match vertex and fragment pixel shaders. So long as they communicated with the same interface, you could use any vertex shader with any compatible fragment shader. And there were even levels of incompatibility they could accept; a vertex shader could write an output that the fragment shader didn't read. And so forth. GLSL didn't have any of that. Vertex and fragment shaders were fused together into what 3D Labs called a "program object".

So if you wanted to share vertex and fragment programs, you had to build multiple program objects. And this caused the second biggest problem. See, 3D Labs thought they were being clever. You take a. Then you take one or more object files and link them into a program. So that's how GLSL compiles: Then you put those shader objects in a program object, and link them together to form your actual program. While this did allow potential cool ideas like having "library" shaders that contained extra code that the main shaders could call, what it meant in practice was that shaders were compiled twice.

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Once in the compilation stage and once in the linking stage. It didn't generate some kind of object code intermediary; it just compiled it once and threw away the answer, then compiled it again at link time. So even if you want to link your vertex shader to two different fragment shaders, you have to do a lot more compiling than in D3D. Especially since the compiling of a C-like language was all done offline , not at the beginning of the program's execution.

There were other issues with GLSL. Perhaps it seems wrong to lay the blame on 3D Labs, since the ARB did eventually approve and incorporate the language but nothing else of their "OpenGL 2. But it was their idea. And here's the really sad part: This was because 3D Labs's hardware was scalar hardware similar to modern NVIDIA hardware , but they were ultimately right in the direction many hardware makers went with their hardware.

They were right to go with a compile-online model for a "high-level" language. D3D even switched to that eventually. The problem was that 3D Labs were right at the wrong time. And in trying to summon the future too early, in trying to be future-proof, they cast aside the present. GLSL is a good language now. But for the time? It was horrible.

And OpenGL suffered for it. While I maintain that 3D Labs struck the fatal blow, it was the ARB itself who would drive the last nail in the coffin. This is a story you may have heard of. By the time of OpenGL 2. It had a lot of legacy cruft. The API wasn't easy to use anymore.

There were 5 ways to do things, and no idea which was the fastest. They called it "Longs Peak. What is so bad about taking some time to improve the API? This was bad because Microsoft had left themselves vulnerable. See, this was at the time of the Vista switchover. With Vista, Microsoft decided to institute some much-needed changes in display drivers. They forced drivers to submit to the OS for graphics memory virtualization and various other things.

While one can debate the merits of this or whether it was actually possible, the fact remains this: Microsoft deemed D3D 10 to be Vista and above only.

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Even if you had hardware that was capable of D3D 10, you couldn't run D3D 10 applications without also running Vista. You might also remember that Vista By the time OpenGL 3. After all, D3D 10 hardware ran D3D 9 applications just fine. And with the rise of PC-to-console ports or PC developers jumping ship to console development. Take your pick , developers didn't need D3D 10 class features. But the ARB missed their opportunity.

And do you want to know the worst part? Despite spending two precious years attempting to rebuild the API from scratch So not only did the ARB miss a crucial window of opportunity, they didn't even get done the task that made them miss that chance. Pretty much epic fail all around.

And that's the tale of OpenGL vs. A tale of missed opportunities, gross stupidity, willful blindness, and simple foolishness. I found it strange that everybody's focusing on user base, when the question is 'game developers', not 'game editors'. For me, as a developer, Linux is a bloody mess. There are so many versions, desktop managers, UI kits, etc If I don't want to distribute my work as open source, where the user can try to recompile so it fits his unique combination of packages, libraries and settings, it's a nightmare! On the other hand, Microsoft is providing most of the time incredible backward compatibility and platform stability.

It is possible to target whole range of machines with one closed-source installer, for instance computers running Windows XP, Vista and 7, 32 and 64 bits flavors, without proper DX or VC redistributables installed, etc DirectX provides input support, sound support, movie playing, etc etc that OpenGL doesn't. It's because there are more Windows users on the planet than Linux and Mac. The truth is that people make things for whichever has the biggest market. The same goes with mobile phones: Android and iPhone have awesome games but Windows Mobile and Symbian don't Whether or not that's true or how true it is is irrelevant; the perception is there and it influences people's decisions.

Because Windows is backed by a huge organization, that more than a decade ago decided they want game development to happen on their platform. This wasn't true for the Mac, and it isn't true now. Not even for iOS. Apple doesn't provide tools for iOS game development. But it's a huge market there's more iPhones out there, than there was PCs in with relatively little competition, so people do it anyhow. As for Linux, there's not even some sort of central institution, that could set any sort of priorities.

The direction in which Linux is going, is more less determined by a bunch of very good, yet slightly unworldly programmers. So you might be able to do the whole thing without any actual programmers.

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Because of that, and because of the nature of businesses, programmers have little say in which platform is chosen. And typically, managers look for support, which is something Microsoft claims to offer, and to deal with things that are somehow seizable to their thought patters, which open source is not. For that reason, most commercial end-user software development is done on windows. I work for a company, that creates flash games, and is thus not bound to a particular platform. However, we all develop on windows, because most of the tools we use aren't available for Linux.

As some have already said, the most important part is the user-base.

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PC gamers use almost exclusively Windows. Even these who use Mac or Linux most often run Windows games through some virtualization or emulation with very, very few exceptions. But demographic is not everything. I wouldn't underestimate the part that Microsoft is doing to make the platform more attractive for game developers. This allows not only development for Windows, but also for Xbox And with the latest edition even for WP7 phones. Ewwww, I don't. I use Linux almost exclusively. I dual-boot to Windows to make Windows builds, and use the Mac for the Mac builds, but that's it.

The trick is a cross-platform framework we've developed over the years. Admittedly my company doesn't do AAA titles, so it may not apply to these, but we do make top casual games see website - CSI: NY, Murder She Wrote and the two upcoming s are examples of titles using important licenses, The Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes 1 and 2 were quite successful as well.

These days Linux is more of a curio when it comes to games development and most developers would be better off fiscally doing an OS X port version before a Linux version see things like Steam. Even then the console market is worth more than these two platform combined for games If you wanted to mono platform DirectX is fine. If you want to be cross platform there's a strong chance you will have to go with OpenGL on at least some of the other platforms. The answer is obvious. The objective of writing a game is to make money.

More end users run Windows, therefore there is a bigger market and you would expect to make more money from a Windows game than a Linux game.

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It's that simple. If ever you ask yourself the question 'Why does someone do That's what it comes down to. Develop on Windows and you get access to some of the best development tools on the planet. Sure, there is some good stuff there; I'm not saying that the tools on other platforms are bad, but those that MS provide are just so far ahead of the pack honourable exception: Valgrind that it's not even funny.

Bottom line is that these tools help you. They help you get stuff done, they help you be productive, they help you focus on errors in your own code rather than wrestle with an API that never quite behaves as documented. So I've gone over all these answers, and as a game developer who has code on console games that have been on Walmart shelves, I have a very different answer.

See, if you want to be on a Nintendo console, you have to get Nintendo's permission, buy from Nintendo's factories, pay Nintendo's overheads, negotiate with Walmart, deal with warehousing, you need money up front to manufacture, to print boxes, to ship, to do all the insurance, et cetera.

If you want onto the XBox, sure there's XBLA, but you still need Microsoft's blessing, you have to wait your turn in line, it's tens of thousands of dollars just to release a patch, etc. I'm not saying the other platforms aren't valuable. And to a lesser extent sure this is fine for Linux too, and if seven customers is good, you can start there.

But Windows has three massive advantages: A lot has to do with politics and control. SGI invested heavily in the project, MS did not. The rest is history. Simply because Linux failed horribly as a desktop system. As somebody pointed out earlier Linux is a mess for developers different libraries, ui toolkits, etc. Another problem is freetardism and the lack of support for proprietary software. Nvidia always provides fine proprietary drivers for Linux however Ubuntu and other distros are not shipping it.

There is also no binary driver interface available for Linux as for Windows. There is a text file called binaryApiNonsense. You can play most of ID softwares games using Nvidia hardware under Linux. Next thing development tools. Last but not least, further tools are missing such as Photoshop. Many game studios code their tools for internal use using the. I almost forgot: The graphics system is horribly, back in the days they just ported X11 over because it was the easiest thing which worked. They failed to properly design and implement a modern graphic system which OSx and Win have.

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False premise - where is evidence that game developers prefer windows? I think user had it more accurately - they want to develop for platforms so they can sell more and make more money: Virus developers also prefer Windows. It's all about the user base. As the link to the Carmack interview below might indicate, DX used to be loathed. It would be interesting to know how it kept enough users for MS to support it until Xbox and modern rewrites made it more popular. Or maybe it was just always good enough so folks stuck with it. Why do people rob banks? Because thats where the money is.

It is not only because of the user base but also for the ease of development. Birth of Conflict One day, sometime in the early 90's, Microsoft looked around. Thus, DirectX was born. As we can read from the GLQuake readme: OpenGL Ascendant Thus the stage is set: D3D was thus given a reprieve. And a lot of things happened at the same time. A messy divorce ensued later. But that's for another time. Want something even stupider? Which they did. While that was the biggest flaw in GLSL, it wasn't the only flaw. By far. Did you have this written up somewhere, or did you write if off the top of your head?

I don't know if you can call it "off the top of your head" for something that took an hour or so to compose, but I didn't have it written up somewhere. So you're willing to attribute this to the rendering system that FPS games use, rather than the engine itself? Sorry; not buying it. Granted, I don't buy the premise that new FPSs have no e-sport potential, even though there are plenty of e-sports tournaments centered around newer FPSs. They may not hold the same attraction that CS does to some players, but don't make the mistake of thinking that those players make up all of FPS e-sports.

I don't even care about most of this stuff and it's still a great read! LOLled for more than 6 minutes at this. I work in an environment with Fedora and Ubuntu. Note that only registered developers are able to access these sites. If you are interested in developing games with Unity Pro for PlayStation platforms, get in touch with your PlayStation representative to discuss becoming an approved developer. Welcome to the plug-in-free web! We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.

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