Hi Philip, Oh, I can completely understand were you are coming from. I myself am strongly tempted to basically support DirectX on the Windows side and use SFML/OpenAL on the Mac side of things. However, try as I might I haven't found anything on the Mac side of things that truly rivals DirectX on a feature by feature comparison, and if sselling games is your business those extra features count for something. For example, everyone knows that one of the games I am working on is USA Raceway. One of the things I want to do is have stearing wheel support with force feedback ability to truly make it more realistic. Problem is DirectInput certainly has all the features I want, but SFML's sfml-window.dll library only has generic input support for stearing wheels and joysticks which makes it functional but lacking features I want/need for that particular product. I've seen similar issues when comparing sfml-audio which uses OpenAL. SFML/OpenAL has pretty decent 3d audio support, but lacks a simple pan control which comes in handy for side-scrollers or something like a Space Invaders shooter. As a result to position the sound you have to use 3d positioning which is overkill for simple arcade type games. As a result I am strongly considering on using DirectX on the Windows side, and when and if I decide to port to Mac or Linux I'll use something like SFML.
HTH On 2/20/10, Philip Bennefall <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Thomas, > > The problem can pretty much be summarized like this. I do not personally > have a Mac and since i've never had any reason to dislike or want to switch > from Windows it's not something that is high priority for me to investigate. > Because of this, I would only do a Mac port if I felt that the commercial > potential was high enough to justify my purchasing a Mac as well as learning > how to develop for it, and then finally port my underlying codebase. I do > not use a cross platform audio library such as OpenAl mainly because it > forces yet another component on to the end user's machine as, apparently, > they decided not to make it possible to link to it staticly for whatever > strange reason. Besides, OpenAl will most likely be using DirectSound on > Windows Xp anyway and so I figured that I might as well interact directly > with it rather than using another third party layer. I will be porting it > over to XAudio2 eventually, but this won't be for at least another couple of > years as I feel that DirectSound is still being widely used. > > Kind regards, > > Philip Bennefall --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
