OSE Walter: OSE Walter: Here’s where we’re at: Right now, it’s best for us from a development perspective to focus on one platform and get the game pretty far along (probably almost done) before doing any porting work. That’s how ports are typically done and it’s more efficient

That’s usually how ports gets to be total pain in the ass, unless you talk about little polish/QA stuff/verifying builds.

As you are already using 3rd party frameworks and engine(s), keeping an eye of everything having mac+linux variants from starts is lot more simpler, then just doing it windows-way “works for me” and then to try figure out how to port it, when you used features/libraries which are not available on mac or linux.

With Unity engine the content creators like 3D modellers, graphicians, game scripts, etc… shouldn’t even know which platform is targetted, as the engine should hide all the differences.

The problem may arise if you add some native DLL, and it’s written by some clueless dude who doesn’t know enough about how to write portable C++ (which is basically only reasonable choice for portable game code anyway, C# may do for some less performance hungry things and is embedded in Unity I guess (judging just by data of other games, I never did try to use either C# or Unity), but “mono” is not equal to full “.net”, while well written C++ [in portable way] can be usually run on many different platforms, including toasters and fridges. And badly written one can be not even compilable by anything else than Microsoft compiler, I have seen lot of this stuff while reviewing some sources, most of it can be easily avoided just by doing regular builds with several compilers. Not even testing each of them, just running the build is usually enough to have code base in decent state, when the porting “starts” seriously. Also testing builds on several platforms often uncovers weird bugs in the code which may go unnoticed on single platform.

At the moment it looks like my original pledge expecting DRM-free linux version will be not fulfilled, and I will receive some wise comments why-this-is-actually-better-and-more-effective. I invested into product which was promised to be done properly and for multiple targets, not effectively. I can live easily without the pre-final builds (didn’t plan to use my access to the beta builds any way), but I’m afraid the linux version will evaporate quietly, or it will not get decent support (all bugfixes from windows version, etc). Though I’m not surprised by this situation, I feel disappointed.