OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/21588/Interview_Plamen_Dragozov_Re_Cross-Platform_at_PopCap Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Sat, 18 May 2013 19:45:10 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com Electronic Arts http://www.osnews.com/thread?366445 http://www.osnews.com/thread?366445 In contrast to PopCap, EA is a very weird company when it comes to cross platform support.

Last year or so EA announced to bring its games (at least a portion of it) to Mac. EA uses/used Cedega for this -- a fork of WINE.
So instead of wring the games in a cross-platform way right from the start, EA prefered to use a Windows compatibility wrapper for Mac ports.

Now it's 2009 and EA acts even weirder.
BattleForce, a RTS game, is written with Qt 4. Native Mac and Linux versions would be very easy and yet BattleForge is only available for Windows.... Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (KugelKurt) Comments RE: Electronic Arts http://www.osnews.com/thread?366452 http://www.osnews.com/thread?366452
Now it's 2009 and EA acts even weirder.
BattleForce, a RTS game, is written with Qt 4. Native Mac and Linux versions would be very easy and yet BattleForge is only available for Windows....


I can not believe what I am hearing. When it basically cost nothing for them in effort to port a game and they will earn money because it will extend the userbase - Why dont they? It makes no sense.

There has to be a games market on Linux/Mac too even if it is smaller. Right? Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (abstraction) Comments RE[2]: Electronic Arts http://www.osnews.com/thread?366487 http://www.osnews.com/thread?366487
I can not believe what I am hearing. When it basically cost nothing for them in effort to port a game and they will earn money because it will extend the userbase - Why dont they? It makes no sense. There has to be a games market on Linux/Mac too even if it is smaller. Right?


Wrong - because it won't cost them "nothing". First, because they would have to test the game on these other OSes as throughly as they test it for Windows. Second, because they would have to provide support for these OSes - which includes training support personnel, etc. If the user base on these OSes turn out to be much smaller than the Windows base, the extra costs won't be justifiable. Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rjamorim) Comments RE[2]: Electronic Arts http://www.osnews.com/thread?366489 http://www.osnews.com/thread?366489 Porting to a new platform never costs "nothing" no matter what toolkit is used. While using Qt4 certainly makes it easier to port there is still a significant amount of testing and platform specific coding that needs to be done.

And that's assuming you wrote the code to be cross platform to begin with. If you went in with the assumption that the code would be windows only you've quite probably made use of windows only libraries or features, perhaps even without realizing it. That would add even more time and cost to porting the code.

Qt4 is probably the best cross platform toolkit available, but anybody who thinks that simply using Qt4 gives you perfect cross platform support for nothing probably hasn't written much cross platform code. Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (dagw) Comments RE: Electronic Arts http://www.osnews.com/thread?366493 http://www.osnews.com/thread?366493
BattleForce, a RTS game, is written with Qt 4. Native Mac and Linux versions would be very easy and yet BattleForge is only available for Windows....

Exactly what parts of it are written with Qt? It's possible they used Qt for the interface and maybe used some non-GUI features of the library, but I have a hard time believing they didn't use Direct3D for the game engine itself. In which case portability goes out the window. Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (flynn) Comments RE[2]: Electronic Arts http://www.osnews.com/thread?366495 http://www.osnews.com/thread?366495 Not you specifically flynn, but this thread is getting off topic here. We should pay a bit more respect to Plamen for his time and focus on PopCap. Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Kroc) Comments RE[3]: Electronic Arts http://www.osnews.com/thread?366498 http://www.osnews.com/thread?366498 No game from id Software was ever released on Linux with official support. No one ever complained about missing official support.

BTW: BattleForge is freeware. Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (KugelKurt) Comments RE[2]: Electronic Arts http://www.osnews.com/thread?366500 http://www.osnews.com/thread?366500
Exactly what parts of it are written with Qt?

No idea. The game became freeware a few days ago, I installed it and found a bunch of Qt 4 DLLs in its folder. Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (KugelKurt) Comments PopCap Games Framework http://www.osnews.com/thread?366511 http://www.osnews.com/thread?366511 Interesting interview, though I would have liked a bit more technical information.

One answer that surprised me a bit was Plamen's response to the question about open-source. He mentions the PopCap Games Framework, but I was under the impression it is in the process of being discontinued and removed by PopCap.

Edited because I can't seem to get the linking to work. References for shutdown are http://developer.popcap.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5829 and http://developer.popcap.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5853 Edited 2009-06-01 16:12 UTC Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (BringBackAnonymous) Comments RE[4]: Electronic Arts http://www.osnews.com/thread?366513 http://www.osnews.com/thread?366513
No game from id Software was ever released on Linux with official support. No one ever complained about missing official support.

BTW: BattleForge is freeware.


But id RELEASED something and kept it current with patches. Of course id did a good job keeping content and executables separate.. so their games could be ported quite easily, Doom has to be one of the most ported games out there. Many companies fall in to the trap of tying key content to a specific platform.. like when a publisher specifies a proprietary spec for in-game movies nobody's heard of... one that gets Blizzard games often. I think that's what the article was trying to get at in terms of cross-platform programming tools.

The guy from PopCap did a good job... I don't think they're used to responding to super-technical questions which is where the article was going. At OSNews we want to know details!!! toolkits, programming languages, what design patterns you like to use!!! Most other sites would care less about that stuff. Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (mabhatter) Comments RE: PopCap Games Framework http://www.osnews.com/thread?366623 http://www.osnews.com/thread?366623
One answer that surprised me a bit was Plamen's response to the question about open-source. He mentions the PopCap Games Framework, but I was under the impression it is in the process of being discontinued and removed by PopCap.


The framework is still open-source and freely available, they have simply "discontinued" support for it. As far as I can tell, this can be likened to id releasing the quake source code with all kinds of developers extending and using it for their own projects.

Open-source is exactly that, there's no "taksies backsies" once you make it public domain. Tue, 02 Jun 2009 06:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (haydenm) Comments