A call to developers that post here
 

I love playing your games, however, it would be awesome if they would also run on a Mac natively. I know FM does run on a Mac, but, that's the only one I know of.

I would be more than happy to beta test any potential port to the Mac.

Thank you!

Please bear in mind that I know a percentage of sims are written using Windows only programming tools/languages (Visual Basic for instance) which makes supporting other Operating Systems more difficult than it might be otherwise.

If any developer is considering attempting cross platform support but doesn't have experience of doing so and wants to chat, I'd be more than happy to act as a sounding board.

Oh yes, most definitely understand that. Plus, there's more Windows based machines than Macs, so potential customers are not as many for Macs for text sim games, which are already a pretty niche market in my opinion.

Question for you Marc: As far as 'extra' (don't know how to really phrase it) development needed to create a cross platform app, about what percentage of extra work is required? For example, is it 15% more work or 90% more work? I know it's not an exact number someone could come up with, but just an approximation.

I love .Net in general, and C# in particular. However, the main issue I have with it is that I can't go multi platform. Well, of course, there's Mono, but it's not really working with my applications. I've been so spoiled with Visual Studio that I don't want to work in another environment.

If someone could come up with a completely platform independent language that sports a Visual Studio like IDE for development of "fat client" applications I'd be all over it.

I remember back a long time ago, there was something to that effect for Java, but now I don't know about any today.

Since I recently added a Mac to my computer-collection, my wish for a multiplatform language/dev environment has increased.. but I other than Java I can't think of any good languages..

Edit: Well of course there's C++, but after meeting up with C# I really can't go back to C++ :)

Beat me to it! :)

Count me in the Coder and JediKooter camp. I still have to do lots of C++ work, but I also do plenty of C#, and C# brings back the "fun" in programming. If Apple doesn't care to provide an implementation on the Mac, well, I'm not going to spoil my fun with anything like actual "work" ;)

Idle curiosity from the peanut gallery: how do you say "C#"? See-Pound? Or what?

"see sharp" like the musical note

Ah, duh ol' non-musical me I guess, that never even crossed my mind.

BlitzMax offers cross-platform support, though it's not exactly an immediate Windows-friendly environment.

http://blitzbasic.com/

It does have some cool stuff, however.

OOTP sells For Windows, Mac, and even Linux.

Now that's what I'm talking about! :)

I wonder if Adobe Air would be a viable platform for a text sim.

I suppose it's at least possible.

I mean, quite a few text sims have been developed using Thin Air :D

Use Qt, then you can run on Windows, Mac and Linux (I am developing my Space Station Sim in it, because I love my C++ and it works with OpenGL which I have more practice in if I decide to do graphics).

Qt has all the basic GUI stuff you would expect from Visual Studio, so it should do the trick for your average text sim.

As a user, Qt always seems clunky. I haven't developed with it,t hough.

I'll just state the obvious one that hasn't been mentioned, but Java would be easy to do cross different OSes.

That's an interesting thought. With twitter apps like Tweetdeck acting so functionally in the wild, I wonder how it'd translate.

I actually mentioned Java, but I personally don't really like it.

I've been curious about Adobe Air, without really knowing where to start. I've never looked at actionscript for flash, so I'm not familiar at all with what tools are available and how to build GUIs, nor how powerful the language is.

Qt doesn't always do everything the basic controls do on the OS (i.e. it doesn't work exactly like the widgets you would get in MFC or on the Mac)... but it gets close enough. Qt is very flexible to develop with though in my opinion, and fast...

My current efforts, with nearly zero code modification I'm sure would work on a Mac, but I use Windows so I don't know for sure.

Anyway, I think its easy for a player to say 'make it run on a Mac', they don't realize that some things are easy to make crossplatform, others are not, and if you don't have the engineering expertise, even the easy stuff becomes fugly.

i think about playing fof on my macs daily

hourly, now that FM is on the damn iphone.

come on, jim!

Just to offer my own opinion. If the game is written from the ground up in a language that is platform independent, and is designed with the idea that you will be porting the game to multiple platforms, the upfront effort is there and doesnt change much, but the porting is a lot less that that. I would guess that 15% is probably realistic though. Espeically if you include testing and QA

Ah ok, that does make sense. I was definitely curious about how much extra would go into something like that and 15% is a lot less than what I was imagining. I was think it was along the lines of around 25 to 40% more.

You should look into VMWare Fusion. It doesn't work all that well for graphically intense games, but it works great for text sims and office apps. You do have to install a Windows OS into it so its not for everyone, but the unity interface integrates everything with the Mac GUI just like native Mac apps once you get everything set up.

Do you use it? If you do, have you tried running FOF on a Mac with it?

Don't they make Wine for Mac? I know I am able to run FOF in Wine in Linux with few problems (for some reason I can't move the main boxes around, gameplanning menu etc., or close once open, hardly a problem though).

To achieve that level of correspondence you do need to design it from square one with the differences of language implementation in mind thus avoiding any major problems. Years ago I produced games for the PC, Amiga and Atari ST. My first expansion - from the Atari to the PC was a nightmare - but for the next game, produced with portability in mind, I was able to get the porting time down to about 2 weeks' work.

Amiga! Heck yea! :)

2 weeks doesn't sound too bad. Sounds like having portability in mind from the get go seems to be the way to make it a smoother transition. Not sure how much it makes sense from an initial financial standpoint, but, my thinking would be to try and have as big of a potential customer base as possible. Which would mean making it work on as many platforms as financially (development expenses) possible.

How much of a nightmare was the Atari to PC port?

It was considerable - two quite different compilers were involved so even simple syntax changes were involved. However, I was lucky in that I had access to the code for both the Atari and PC versions of Headcoach V3 thanks to the originator (I ported that game to the Amiga from the ST - much easier!) and that put me on the right track. Otherwise it may never had happened.

Very nice! Sounded a bit painful though. How much hair did you have left after that? ;)

Games were a lot simpler then - but the state of my hair now suggests you may be right :)