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Port DirectX Games to the Mac

Posted by pudge on from the we-just-don't-have-enough-games dept.

tassii writes "MacCentral reports that Coderus' MacDX provides PC game developers with a way of moving that DirectX code to the Mac without having to rewrite it from scratch. Coderus claims that most code which uses DirectX can simply be recompiled and linked to the MacDX libraries. Maybe I can finally play the full Command and Conquer series."

3 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. sdl. by gl4ss · · Score: 4, Informative
    what you're looking for/would liek to see world use is something like sdl.

    Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power." Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Win32, BeOS, MacOS, Solaris, IRIX, and FreeBSD.


    since i didnt see anyone else replied/posted with this mandatory link i did, whoring an' all. the recent starcon2 port uses sdl as well, and thus wa s quickly available on very many platforms instantly.
    --
    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  2. Re:Worthless,... by Graff · · Score: 5, Informative
    And since network gaming seems to be the place, the gaming industry is heading, imho there is a need for an free network-api, which is designed for gaming, like directplay. There's OpenGL, OpenML, now who will create OpenNL for OpenNetwerkLibrary?

    There is one already. It is called OpenPlay. Here is a quote from the site:
    What is OpenPlay? OpenPlay is a cross-platform network abstraction layer designed to simplify the task of creating programs which communicate across multiple computers.

    While originally designed for multiplayer games, it is useful for any developer who wants an easy, platform-independent way to send messages to programs running on other machines. It completely abstracts both OpenTransport and Winsock, and its plug-in architecture makes it easy for you to support new transport protocols.

    The Myth series uses OpenPlay, as well as some other games
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    Sapere aude!
  3. Re:Dear god by Textbook+Error · · Score: 3, Informative

    Directx is Satan spawn. I would hate for this to be the primary graphic base for games on my mac

    I hate to break it to you, but this technique (a wrapper that implements Direct3D/Draw/etc on top of OpenGL) is the primary graphic base for games on your Mac. Every Mac porting house already has their own set of libraries to do just this, it's just none of them have bothered to make them public like MacDX.

    The real market for this is for PC developers, and it remains to be seen how many of them will actually take the bait and try and port titles over themselves (making money off developer tools is a real challenge, as you're selling to the very people who could write it themselves :-).

    There are a lot of other issues you need to consider when doing a port (endian-swapping is the biggest time sink normally, followed by code using VC-- "extensions", then platform specific issues - working around bugs in OpenGL on 9 which will never be fixed, etc), and the code which talks to DirectX is normally a pretty small part of a game's code base.

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    Nae bother