Author Topic: Maintaining Compatibility with LINUX & MAC  (Read 3580 times)

Offline Vagabond

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Maintaining Compatibility with LINUX & MAC
« on: January 02, 2017, 03:01:44 AM »
What is the community's expectations on maintaining compatibility with Linux and Macintosh for the official Outpost 2 builds?

I know that with a little help from HOOMAN, the scenarios I have created at least run on LINUX via WINE. Although I do not test them myself on a LINUX machine.

I have no idea if they work on Macs, or any idea what DRAKMAR is doing to make the Mac download of Outpost 2 tenable. I also don't have a Mac to test them on.

I suppose if a scenario DLL was not compatible with Linux/WINE or Mac, it wouldn't stop the game overall from being played on the machine even if included in the official download.

Anyways, I thought it should be addressed if we are getting ready to add more custom scenarios and other updates to the official download.

Offline Arklon

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Re: Maintaining Compatibility with LINUX & MAC
« Reply #1 on: January 02, 2017, 11:23:50 AM »
For missions, I don't see this ever really being an issue. Sure, they're DLLs and you can technically do whatever you want in them, including things that WINE wouldn't like, but there's no real reason to touch anything like that.

For mods, it may be an issue, depending on the nature of the mod. For example, early versions of NetHelper didn't work in WINE because I used Microsoft's UPnP API which isn't yet implemented in WINE.

For the game itself, there's things we should look into to improve WINE compatibility. I'm told fonts look horrible, but I also heard they may have improved that in newer versions of WINE?

Offline Hooman

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Re: Maintaining Compatibility with LINUX & MAC
« Reply #2 on: January 02, 2017, 12:58:51 PM »
I'd say don't worry about it. No formal testing needed for non-Windows platforms, at least for level code. The game is targeted towards Windows. If someone notices small problem affecting platform compatibility, and it's easy enough to fix, by all means make the effort. That's about as far as it should go. Plus, it's unlikely level code will be platform specific. You'd have to be doing something pretty custom, and likely bringing in outside APIs.

For game mods I'd appreciate a little bit of concern over platform compatibility, particularly since things currently are portable, though I don't think it needs to be a blocking issue. I like that the NetHelper works on Wine now, but it would still be useful even if it didn't. We should probably make an attempt to test on other platforms as a final step before a new release, though this doesn't need to be addressed while still working on a release. Primarily testing should be done on Windows. Actually, testing on other platforms after a release should be fine. Any problems are not likely to be urgent, and can be patched up after the fact.

Testing after the fact pushes work on the few oddballs who insist on running something different. That's fine. We have limited development resources, so we should try to keep the development burden low.

Offline Vagabond

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Re: Maintaining Compatibility with LINUX & MAC
« Reply #3 on: January 03, 2017, 11:43:20 PM »
Arklon & Hooman,

Thank you for providing some steering on handling compatibility.