
A Developer's Perspective On Porting Games To Linux - intull
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY4NTI
======
derekp7
One slide mentioned having to fix hardcoded backslashes to forward slashes,
and using path.join to make it portable. But on Windows, you can use forward
slashes as well at the system call level. You only need to use backslashes on
the command line, since many programs interpret a forward slash as the
beginning of an argument.

~~~
blt
Yes, but that doesn't mean the original developers used them :)

Some developers are shockingly Microsoft-centric...

~~~
flohofwoe
Doesn't have to be on purpose, for instance Visual Studio inserts backslashes
in autocompleted C/C++ header paths by default (can be set to forward slash in
the settings, but default is backslash). The case-insensitive filesystems on
Windows and OSX are usually also a problem when moving games with hundred-
thousands of source- and asset files over to a Linux build system.

~~~
scrollaway
OSX/HFS has case insensitivity? Since when?

~~~
flohofwoe
I was baffled too but that's like it is by default, on my MBP #include paths
don't have to match case, just like on Windows. Or you can do a 'echo blub
>bla.txt' followed by a 'echo blob BLA.txt' and there will only be a single
file 'bla.txt' which contains the string 'blob'.

------
whyrusleeping
Seeing things like this makes me really happy, even if you are a non gaming
linux user, work like this benefits everything else you do and pushes
companies like AMD and Nvidia to improve their drivers. I know that since
valve started supporting linux a few graphical issues on my fedora laptop have
disappeared.

------
voltagex_
The Mesa improvements mentioned in the slides:
[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY4MjA](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY4MjA)

------
lmedinas
I hope this at least least will motivate more developers to use GL/GLES for
game development since it will be easier to keep it multiplatform (iOS,
Android, OSX, Linux, Windows). But still there are a lot of things mentioned
there that also applies for general big project development on Linux.

------
blt
Why do people use the term "postmortem" for retrospectives of projects that
didn't fail?

~~~
mnem
Postmortem doesn't (to me at least) imply failure. Specifically for games it's
just a critical analysis of what worked and what didn't on a project for the
purposes of learning for the next one.

I don't know if the phrase was originated by Game Developer Magazine, but it
certainly popularised it's use within the games industry. The GD Mag
postmortems are generally exceptionally candid and a great series to learn
things from. See
[http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/](http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/)
and the general archives at
[http://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag](http://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag) (I'm not sure
if the website has all the postmortems that featured in the, sadly defunct,
printed magazine).

~~~
jrochkind1
you know 'mortem' means 'death', right?

~~~
thuuuomas
Not all deaths are failures. Sometimes things just end.

~~~
psykovsky
It's only a game. You may restart it using a new life.

------
sillysaurus3
Microsoft seems to be rapidly losing mindshare.

~~~
Guvante
Not yet, developers are still in the "toying with Linux" phase. Microsoft will
be losing mindshare when people install Linux for reasons other than "I don't
like Microsoft" _in great numbers_.

~~~
rasz_pl
They might be toying with Linux, but they are shipping for Android. Every new
game faces 'do we want a piece of 1 billion devices pie?' magic question.

~~~
Guvante
While I don't disagree with your point, developing for Android isn't too close
to developing for Linux, and the games available are very different at the
moment.

