Linux / Mac ports

[cliffski]

Does anyone have experience of dealing with a third party to port their game to another platform? I'm considering what can be acheived by porting Democracy to Linux or the Mac, but dont have the skills or hardware to do either. I know Loki used to do linux ports, but it looks like they went belly-up years ago! who filed the gap? or is it my own stupid fault for not using a cross platform engine to start with? :D

[Emmanuel]

Red Marble Games do Mac ports around here.

If you port your game to ptk (http://www.phelios.com/ptk/) on win32, Phelios or myself can help with compiling it on Mac and giving it good coverage on Mac news sites. ptk also has support for Linux (not fully up to date on latest ptk features) although this isn't a very successful commercial venture at this point.

Best regards,
Emmanuel

[Jack Norton]

or is it my own stupid fault for not using a cross platform engine to start with? :D
Yes, you should have used ptk ;) anyway I think that you should be able to port the game to win32 with it in maximum one week of work...

[ggambett]

or is it my own stupid fault for not using a cross platform engine to start with? :D
Not really, but it's your stupid fault if you have DirectX calls scattered throughout the code :) If you have the drawing code more or less encapsulated, porting to SDL or to OpenGL should be fairly trivial. Last week it took me about 6 hours to write an OpenGL renderer for my engine and about 8 to write a Direct3D 7 renderer, both from scratch, and both running BBB and WWW flawlessly. Of course, everything drawing-dependent is hidden in a ~1000 line source file.

[princec]

<--- smartass ;)

Cas :)

[cliffski]

nah, I have my DX stuff pretty cleanly separated. I've worked out what to do now, I'm having someone port the game for me. Maybe I should take the hit in learning terms and use PTK. I've used my own engine for so long I'm a bit lost using other stuff, although switching to KSound was amazingly easy.
This is the first game I've done where it seems like it might make enough money for a port to be worthwhile. Hopefully that will be true of the next one as well.

[Red Marble Games]

Sorry, can't resist a little ad: the advantage of using me for your Mac ports is that you don't just get a port, you also get an established Mac-only games site with a healthy newsletter subscriber list and decent marketing -- so a little more turnkey than just hiring a programmer to give you a Mac version, leaving all the Mac-specific marketing (and tech support) in your lap.

[/advertisement] :)

[rioka]

Nice ad. I'm almost sold. :) Just one question, though - aside from ptk, is there any others that you can work with to port to Mac? Or is that the only option?

[ManuelFLara]

Are you talking about Red Marble Games' services? I'm sure they'll be able to port your game whatever you use, as they've done in the past with other games. IIRC they've even ported some PopCap games.

[alikus]

Nice ad. I'm almost sold. :) Just one question, though - aside from ptk, is there any others that you can work with to port to Mac? Or is that the only option?

I think you might also consider Absolutist. So far they've done Mac ports only of their own games, but others won't be a problem...and they also can simultaneously do porting to PDAs and mobile...The cost also should be low as they are in Ukraine.

[Red Marble Games]

Are you talking about Red Marble Games' services? I'm sure they'll be able to port your game whatever you use, as they've done in the past with other games. IIRC they've even ported some PopCap games.

Right, not to hijack this thread into something that belongs in the Services for Hire forum, but I port most anything; PTK is something people use when they want to create and maintain the Mac version themselves. And yes, I did the original Mac ports of Bejeweled and Alchemy.

Mark