Re: Addressing Some Concerns About USA Games
Sebby, I completely agree with you that these days writing cross-platform code is a must. It was one thing 10 years ago when a game developer could count on his or her end users running Windows XP, that Visual Basic 6 compatibility was no real concern, and Mac and Linux were not really alternatives for the majority of blind users. All that has changed and there are a lot of different choices for blind users. The Mc OSX blind community has extremely grown the last five or six years, and so has the blind Linux user base. That means a game developer can no longer simply keep on writing games in VB 6 and ignoring market trends in other areas such as Mac, Linux, iOS, etc. The only way to satisfy all concerned is to begin developing games and other products using a cross-platform design. Unfortunately, there are some in this community who can not or will not see it that way.
In my experience a lot of the people who are wining about the time I took doing research are not power user s. They have no intention of exorcising their freedom of choice of going Mac or using Linux. They are still running XP on their eight to ten year old PC, playing the same old games written in VB 6, and have no plans to upgrade to Windows 7 or Windows 8 unless they go kicking and screaming. So for them the time spent on improving compatibility with Windows 8 or working on new versions for Mac or Linux is a waste of time. It doesn't effect them, and they think everyone else should agree with them.
As for the open source .NET Framework its a nice idea in concept, but licensing is too much of a hassle in my point of view. I have developed some stuff using Mono, it works, is a nice framework, but I feel more comfortable just developing my libraries and game code in C++. It is more secure, runs better, and Microsoft etc can't stick their nose in and cause problems due to licensing concerns. I already found out how unreliable Microsoft is, I got burned once, and I choose no
t to repeat that mistake.
Raven, there isn't much in that case a normal user can do. If a developer writes a game in a language that is no longer supported on the platform, is buggy, and is unwilling to rewrite or upgrade the game the only options left are emulation or virtual machines. As these games I am working on new games I obviously want to avoid both of those choices by not using an old language, old APIs, old tools, whatever. I hope to write a game that is fully Windows 8 compatible so that it will hopefully run on newer Windows releases with as little maintenance and updating as possible.
As for your point about creativity I think creativity is only part of the problem. Do remember most of the guys developing games here are amateurs with very little experience with mainstream games and only picked up a language like Visual Basic because it is easy. They may not be necessarily capable of writing a level editor or some other complex feature you feel should be included in game x. It is for those reasons that our games seem a bit plain and perhaps uninteresting compared to what is available from indie mainstream developers.
However, to your general point about modding I do think you have a good point. I remember back in the early 90's when ID Software released Doom everyone who was anyone had fun creating their own mods for Doom which was awesome. Although, I didn't personally create any mods myself I know people who did and I remember back in high school and college people passing around custom wad files for Doom that allowed them to play Star Trek, Star Wars, and other customized versions of Doom. I can see how that openness and ability to mod the software can and does allow non-programmers and people who just want something different to play the game in a slightly different way.
In fact, one of my favorite games is Lone Wolf because David Greenwood added the mission parser. That mission parser adds a huge amount of replay value because in theory every end user can write and play an unlimited number of missions for the game. Were I or another developer to do that in our games I definitely can see how and why that would be important to you and others.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=171687#p171687
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