Freecraft Out For The Mac

bsharitt writes "Mark Pazolli has ported Freecraft to Mac OS X, making this popular open source RTS game avalble on the three major platforms (it's been on Linux/*nix and Windows for a while). The complete download is here."

Comments

Let the flames begin?

[Paul Burney]

It's cool that he's ported the project to OS X.

I wonder how soon the flames will start up again? For reference, see when the game/engine was a focus on developer's slashdot:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/0 5/27/0347226&mode=flat&tid=127

I just got my copy of Warcraft III so it'll be a while before I can test this out. FWIW, I appreciate Blizzard shipping the Mac version at the same time as the PC.

Uh oh.... Here come the bnetd flames...

Re:Let the flames begin?

[iomud]

Did you notice that wc3 was a little more expensive than other games on the shelf? I wonder if the expense in time and resources for porting to mac were responsible for the slight price increase. If so I wouldnt mind paying the extra cost for the ability to play future/other games on all my machines. Especially on my mac though.

Re:Let the flames begin?

[BitGeek]

I worked on two games that shipped simultaneously on the Mac and Windows platforms in the late 90s.

The development of parallel versions did not add significantly to the development time nor expense.

Because we had good mac developers (I was one) we simply had our development team spread acrosss platforms -- rather than porting. So, for instance the "scound guy" was a mac programmer, and his code was written to run under windows and Mac with a small hardware specific sound API that was common.

BTW FWIW, its much cheaper and faster to develop a game for the mac-- and this was under the classic os-- than for windows. The APIs are much better and more consistent.

The only reason there are less games on teh mac is because of stupid marketing dipshits. Mac games are actually 20-200 percent more profitable -- meaning the mac version may make that much more money even though the prices are the same because support for windows products is so expensive. And while the mac marketshare is only %20 of the market or so (not %5 - that's new machines sold and they don';t count any sold at the apple store or at apple retail locations, its a bogus number) -- that %20 of the market has far less competition than the windows market, and so your sales may well be split 50/50 depending on the games appeal.

But most companys, and game companies, make such decisions without actually doing the math, and so perception causes there to be fewer games out for the mac.

This same set of perceptions is going to be hurting Linux gaming for the next 5-10 years as well.

This even though I suspect its very cost effective to develop games under linux, as comapred to the windows API set.