Hi Dark,
Unfortunately, that is so very true. Based on my own research here
there really isn't any single high-quality cross-platform solution
whenit comes to creating games like Mysteries of the Ancients because
often times we end up sacrificing something in the process. Its one
thing if it is a relatively simple game like Poker, Blackjack,
monopoly, etc that doesn't require precision audio, joysticks, and
that sort of thing, and quite another when we are talking something
like Mysteries of the Ancients which does. The solution I've decided
upon for that problem is to create a engine that targets each specific
platform. For Windows the Genesis 3D engine will use DirectX, MS Sapi,
the Windows API where my Linux version of the Engine might use SDL,
OpenAL, Speech-Dispatcher, and so on. That way if the Linux version of
the engine lacks some feature such as force feedback support it would
be limited to only that platform, and not to everyone running Windows.
This is really the only way to satisfy everyone involved.
Not only that in a lot of cases I was having difficulty finding a
cross-platform solution for certain things like TTS support anyway. On
Windows my speech library wraps Sapi 5, which is fine for Windows, but
wouldn't work for Linux or Mac OS. Each of those platforms have
alternative TTS APIs such as Speech-Dispatcher on Linux. The only
truly cross-platform solution for that problem is to use an open
source synth like ESpeak, and to be honest it doesn't sound that good
and would drag the quality of the games and my engine down just
because I'd have to settle for whatever was cross-platform rather than
using any voices present on the machine. That's not ideal for what I'm
trying to do here.
So this way by creating platform specific game engines I can resolve
that problem pretty easily. On Windows by wrapping Sapi the gamer
could use Microsoft Anna, one of the AT&T voices, the Cepstral voices,
or any other voice that has Standard Sapi 5.x support. On Linux by
wrapping Speech-Dispatcher I can support ESpeak, Ivona TTS, Cepstral
Voices, Eloquence, etc via the Speech-Dispatcher generic TTS API. It
works out for everybody in the end.
So, yeah, things will definitely improve for everyone. I'll be
focussing on the best APIs for each platform from now on, supporting
them directly, rather than through layers of middleware that may or
may not work as desired. I'm going to kick out a lot of the
third-party middleware and my engine will be the middleware between
the op and the game rather than sitting on a bunch of cross-platform
middleware that clearly doesn't work. You shouldn't have to sacrifice
anything in this case since if the feature is supported on your
operating system I will do what I can to support it in that version of
the engine. So heres three cheers for beta 20.
Cheers!
On 6/17/11, dark <d...@xgam.org> wrote:
Hi tom.
I'm really pleased to here about the iminant release of windows mota, sinse
i was well impressed with Beta 18 and am really looking forward to playing
the rest of the game.
while I understand the logic of a fully cross platform engine that works on
everything, personally I must confess it has sometimes felt that mota has
sacrificed quality for cross platform compatibility in a single version of
the game.
However, sinse now you are developing separate ports for each platform
which, rather than using cross platform components common to all platforms
can use the best available components on each platform, I think things will
very much improve.
The only downer is obviously this will take some extra work, however on the
pluss side there will be subsequent versions available which owners of
different platforms can buy, obviously starting with the windows
release, ---- a fact which, as someone who uses windows I'm quite happy with
myself.
I'll also be interested to see how this trophy case works and what sorts of
challenges we will have in the game for collecting trophies.
All the best,
Dark.
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