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Exsortis wrote:

WotC_DM,

Have you guys considered using Cider to port the DirectX apps to the Mac? EA is doing it with some of their games. It would be a much easier way to show some love to us Mac users than having to write a Mac version from scratch. Or you could use a "platform-agnostic" framework like OGRE.

-E

I've already mentioned this a couple times elsewhere on the boards, to a deafening.... silence. Hell, even a bit of lip service to the idea might help a bit, yes?

Though I did see CodeWeavers mentioned over on the EnWorld boards as a possible workaround for the MacIntel users among us. From the description, it seems like a user-enabled version of Cider, and I saw HL2 mentioned as being runnable under it, so I bet it could handle DDI and the apps.

It's an option, and cheaper than Windows.

And no asinine Registry to have to worry about.... (sorry, rant incoming, can't help it -- the Windows Registry is the worst-designed pos in existence and is the singular reason why I'll never purchase a Windows box meself).

There are a number of problems with taking a system multiplatform. The biggest one is development cost. The majority of programmers are going to have learned on Windows and with DX, and the ones that can do everything and are great at cross-platform and coding for multiple systems are worth a lot more then someone that can work on just one platform. Any decent computer developer makes a fair amount of moeny, when you get into the ones that know 5 different systems and have the experience to program for cross-platform then they cost significantly more.

Not to mention that someone with those skills is much more likely to go to a bigger company that has a much larger use for their skills. WOTC doesn't have a huge need, nor budget for, a lot of programmers, and there isn't going to be a huge amount of room for advancement either. Simply put, WOTC probably can't offer the wages and chances for advancement to hire the types of programmers they would need for a very robust cross-platform development.

It also means that even if they do get some people that can do it then still need to retrain all of their previous employees to be able to do cross-platform as well, which takes a lot of time and money. Not to mention that with that training and greatly increased marketability many of those employees might move on.



We have no idea how much of a profit margin they see to this part of the business either. Their current projections might show that even with very good results on their programs it might take years before they have paid for the development. Sure the subscription seems like a lot of moeny, but that money gets spread out over a lot of people, and the amount that goes to recooping the costs of program development is pretty small.

Sure openning the program up to Mac is going to increase the potential market base, but that doesn't mean its going to be worth it. Mac holds somewhere around 5% of the market share right now, which when you consider that a good portion of that market share is NOT invidual users (as someone else claimed) but companies. There are a lot of schools and other companies (mainly video/graphic production companies) that buy Macs. You can tell that the Mac Pro is not really aimed and normal users at all.

Then there is the question of what percentage of the Mac users are gamers. If you look at the demographic that Mac is targetting with their computers, it is anything but what is the typical demographic of D&D players. Sure there are a number of people that do both, but the majority of the target audience for Macs and D&D are completely different.


Then there is the fact that most Mac users have already been "forced" to use some form of dual booting/parallel/emulated version of Windows (wine/cedar/VMWares/etc) so they can use other Windows software. So even if those Mac using D&D players want to use this software, they probably can, they just have to go through a little more effort (and going through a little extra effort for D&D never seems to be a problem for D&D players/DMs).


They might come out with the software for cross-platform, but it doesn't seem likely to me unless they outsource the software to a company specifically designed for cross-platform development.

It would be nice if everything would work on every platform but it is usually not worth the extra cost for the relatively small increase in users.