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porting question
tofuhead Mar 2, 2017
i don't know much of the current game development .. except what I've tried and toyed around in godot and unity. so I have to ask, what is all this fuzz around porting games?

are they using something different, but what I've noticed is that you can just publish games by exporting them to platform desired, and thats it.

elighten me.

.b
Ehvis Mar 2, 2017
Only indie games use engines that have exports to platforms that include linux. Most AAA games really only do DirectX and Playstation. Porting then becomes a matter of writing code around the game engine so that it will run over OpenGL (or Vulkan in the near future) instead. Not so easy because these things aren't designed for that.
Guppy Mar 2, 2017
Quoting: tofuheadi don't know much of the current game development .. except what I've tried and toyed around in godot and unity. so I have to ask, what is all this fuzz around porting games?

are they using something different, but what I've noticed is that you can just publish games by exporting them to platform desired, and thats it.

elighten me.

.b

The whole 'export to platform' is a relatively new concept - most older games are built on in house engines or licensed engines that were not built with cross platfrom in mind simply because windows was seen ( and still is by some ) as the only game in town. iOS and android changed that a bit and some the big engines started exploring cross platform ( mostly still Windows, xbox, ps4 & iOS ).

The 'fuzz' with porting these older titles are, dependencies on libraries that aren't crossplatform ( direct input, audio, etc ) and bad coding practices such as ( but not limited to );

- Inconsistent file & folder capitalization ( windows don't care so why should the programmer ? )
- Abusing known windows bugs
- Abusing compiler macros/bugs ( I know people that are stuck on specific VS versions due to this one )

And newer games will be built at least partially on old code and so suffer from the same problems.

Very few companies will rewrite their engines completely or switch to a new 3rd party engine simply because it costs money. ( some do tho )
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