Hi Tom.
this makes perfect sense, and indeed is also the reason why I have never
investigated mac or lynux in further detail, simply because, while I know
there are probably technical advantages to either os, those advantages don't
matter a bit to me if they won't help me do what I do, part of which
obviously includes a great many games.
it's like the betamax vhs debate. Betamax was actually a more efficient tape
system, less worn out, and technically clearer, however sinse fewer video
companies secured betamax contracts, the system went down rapidly, however
technically good it was.
This is indeed another problem of competative capitalism, that the most
prophitable and universal solution is the one that wins, not necessarily the
best, but until there is another regulating standard on which to judge these
things there's not a lot we can do.
Less politically though, another point I've noticed is that many people who
work routinely with computers have an intrinsic liking for the subject in
themselves.
For instance, a close friend of mine is a professional programm designer.
When discussing his job, he stated that he gained satisfaction through the
process of being given a task to write a program to fulfill and then going
off and creatively writing one, irrispective of what that task was.
For instance, he recently had to write a program to log and regulate all the
pay slips and online reciets issued by a company, and track these to the
employees taxes. To me, i can imagine nothing quite so dull, but for my
friend, the fact that he! got to design the program to work with this
information, calculate the numbers involve and display it securely and
relevantly was the important thing, ---- ie, it was the process he enjoyed.
The same goes with game design.
if (as I hope), in september of this year I write that text rpg I've always
wanted to, for me the fun process will be the actual writing and designing
and the fact that I'm creating a world and story for people to interact
with. The programming will just bhe the process of making that thing happen,
and as such I'll look around for a programming method that is easiest for me
to use in doing that, rather than worry about a hole lot of programming
concerns, such as for instance cross platform compatibility.
yes, I want people to be able to play it, but sinse the process of writing
the world and story is to me more interesting, I'd rather spend my time on
creating something good in windows, than learning a lot of what is to me
comparatively less interesting stuff to create something to run on mac or
lynux.
Of course, if the option I choose is something like Python (which seems
likely given how easy python code looks to understand), it might come with
cross compatibility anyway, but if not, I'm not going to worry about it.
Selfish? ---- just slightly, though I could also make a reasonable arguement
that I'm simply focusing on the things I know! I can do, namely write
convincing and interesting pros and come up with some balanced game
mechanics, rather than the things I probably cannot such as memory
management, worry about libraries, garbage checking and all the other weerd
alchemical stuff that programmers need to do.
in fact if I could just write in near to plane english I'd gladly do that,
even if someone had to download something in order to play it. indeed I
might just skip the programming altogether and carry on writing gamebooks
with darkgrue, ---- though inf airness there are matters of random
description and combat rules that would need a little dice work behind the
scenes which darkgrue couldn't handle, and the system I had in mind for a
text rpg was rather more complex than just a basic gamebook.
Beware the Grue!
Dark.
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