RE: [GD-General] dev environments

[Patrick M D. <pa...@wa...>]

On Sun, 23 Dec 2001, Philip Harris wrote:

> > > Personally, I'd rather build the tools into the game using a
> > > GUI library. It saves all that messing around with stand
> > > alone tools :)
> >
> > This is fine, when it works, but there are many types of
> > tools where it just doesn't fit within the game.
>
> Similarly there's many types of game where it's inefficient to run cross
> platform on the Mac.

Having done quite a bit of cross development work for Mac/Windows, what
types of games do you think are not appropriate on the Mac?  I'm not
disputing the claim - just curious about your opinions.

> Several of those examples you mentioned I wouldn't build a standalone
> app for anyway, a straightforward spreadsheet can sometimes be far more
> efficient than a custom tool, no matter how easy it was to write the
> tool.

Absolutely - one really nice tool I used in the past was Resourcerer. It
provided an environment for editing data structures that only required a
simple definition of how that structure should be represented on disk.
That, combined with a spreadsheet for raw data, provided almost all the
tooling we needed for game development.

> Given that we're considering porting a couple of titles to the Mac I may
> have the opportunity to try out your suggestions in the future.

Will this be OS X only or will you support older versions of the OS?
Many modern games do not port well to older Mac OS versions.  This is
especially true for games that rely on virtual memory and file i/o
performance.

Patrick