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OS Independent Scotland Yard Released

Posted by Zonk on from the follow-the-crook-watson! dept.

DarkLaser writes "When's the last time you played Scotland Yard? A version called London Law, written by Paul Pelzl, is now in beta. Its updated status can be seen on the freshmeat information page. It is written in Python, and intended to be able to run on Linux, BSD, Mac, and Windows."

4 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. Cross platform gaming by Alcimedes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm glad to see that another online game is built around the idea that cross-platform gaming is important.

    What I think a lot of companies might not realize is that when you're making a game that plays on Mac or Linux boxes, you're not just adding that ~2% - 3% of marketshare to your total games sales.

    Instead, what you're doing is creating a game that everyone can play. That means next time someone decides to have a LAN party, YOUR game is at the top of the list for anyone who would rather bring their Linux or Mac machine along with them. Sure, there are half a dozen MMPORG's out there. However, the only ones I'm considering, along with half a dozen friends of mine are ones that are cross platform. The reason is that we want to make sure our friends who use something other than Windows can still play in our groups. So yeah, there might be one Mac user and one Linux user out of 10 people, but writing your game to support those two people happened to net you another 8 monthly subscriptions.

    1. Re:Cross platform gaming by geoffspear · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So if I release a really horribly Linux game I wrote in 2 days, you can guarantee that 100% of Linux users will buy it from me for $50? Neat. I didn't realize that people automatically buy things "by default".

      --
      Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
    2. Re:Cross platform gaming by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      What I think a lot of companies might not realize is that when you're making a game that plays on Mac or Linux boxes, you're not just adding that ~2% - 3% of marketshare to your total games sales.

      Actually, you are. The important point is that if you create your game using cross platform tools you get 2-3% more market share (your figures, I'd expect it to be closer to 5-10%) at no extra cost. If you write it using DirectX, then try to port it then it will cost a huge amount to get this extra few percent.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  2. Re:Scotland Yard Live in Toronto by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The charm of Scotland Yard was in the interesting map with its twisting streets and interesting street names. Your Toronto map is a boring grid.