Developing WINE-Friendly Windows Software?

Michael Fourdraine asks: "I'd like to hear the Slashdot community view on if there is any merit in trying to develop a Windows compatible software and trying to make it compatible with WINE. Personally I have had no experience in Win32 or Linux software Development, but I still wonder if it is possible to develop a game to run under Windows and optimize it for WINE at the same time. If so, why don't developers take advantage of that option? Or does it simply make more sense to stick to developing one product and then port it to multiple platforms? Finally if there is anyone developing any software in this form what do developers keep in mind during development in order to ensure smooth usage under WINE?"

Comments

Please, don't.

[netfunk]

I port video games to Linux for a living, so I am probably qualified to comment on this.

Do NOT optimize for Wine. You probably can't anyhow, since both Win32 (at least, DirectX) and Winelib are moving targets to varying degrees, what works and works well in one version of Wine will not necessarily do so in another.

I think Wine is an excellent piece of work, but I'd imagine even the Wine developers would rather have native Linux applications than emulated win32 apps (and if they don't, they should).

This is doubly true for game development, where you need every CPU cycle you can reasonably get.

Wine, Winelib, and WineX are really meant to be bridges to make Linux more feasible in the short term by letting Win32 programs run in some form, even if they just limp along. They are afterthought solutions to running software that we have no real ability to use, but think we can't do without.

The ideal solution is to write portable code in the first place. Be mindful of what you write, and follow some basic principles:

1) Don't tie yourself to a compiler. If you build on Visual C, take time to build on a different compiler (specifically, GCC) every now and then. Getting code to compile on various platforms is half the battle.

2) Don't tie yourself to a platform's API. Use cross-platform libraries and toolkits where you can, use abstraction layers in your own code where you can't. If you do this right, a good chunk of the porting work is just filling in stubs for a new platform. For game development, you should be looking at Simple Directmedia Layer for most of your needs. Other libraries like my own PhysicsFS can abstract file handling for you. OpenAL can give you 3D positional audio if SDL's stereo output is insufficient, and OpenGL gives you 3D accelerated graphics if SDL's 2D linear framebuffer is insufficient.

3) If PowerPC (MacOS, specifically) is of interest to you, be conscious of byte ordering. Always be conscious of structure packing regardless of platform. If 64-bit platforms (Alpha, Itanium, Hammer) are of interest to you in the future, don't do silly things like cast pointers to ints and such.

4) Don't use assembly code. Ever. If you _must_ use it, you better have a C fallback. Be smart and use NASM on win32 and Linux, so you don't have to deal with the massive differences in inline syntax between Visual Studio and GCC.

If you are more than one developer, the easiest way to do this is to have a devcrew made up of at least one person for each targeted platform. This makes it easy to make sure that things aren't silently breaking on MacOS while you write code for Win32, since that developer will catch it in his next code sync (you _are_ using source revision tools, right?).

Good luck to you.

--ryan.