Re: [orca-list] Great news for blind gamers

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Hi Petr,


On 11/9/12, Petr Bláha <hammet pb seznam cz> wrote:
> Off course, it would be great if game developers would port all their
> games from windows to linux or mac, so these games become cross platform
> and all the blind gamers would be able to play them, not only in single
> player, but in multiplayer as well.
> But i thing it is unreal, they won't do it, cause it needs too much work

Well, it may be a lot of work, but I think the principle problem has
to do with the languages and tools they are using. A number of VI game
developers use technologies like Visual Basic 6, Sapi 5, DirectX 8,
etc which are all specifically Windows technologies. That makes it
almost impossible to port the games to Linux without a complete
rewrite all because the developers didn't write the games with any
kind of cross-platform design in mind.

The other problem is many VI game developers are self-taught like Jim
Kitchen and unfortunately Visual Basic 6 is all they know. Most would
be unwilling to learn a totally new programming language like Python,
Java, C/C++, or one of the .NET languages just to make cross-platform
games.

The sad thing is that it is possible to write a game using C# .NET
for Mono with SDL .NET and that game could be quickly and easily
ported to Windows, Mac, and Linux without a great deal of effort. It
just depends on the developer in question taking some forethought as
how to design the game from the start.

> Nobody will pay them money for porting their games to linux or mac, so
> games ported from windows to these platforms would be probably more
> expensive, to pay their wowk with porting.

I'm not so sure of that. Yes, there are some open source diehards out
there, but I do think the Linux VI market is large enough to cover the
cost of porting some games to Linux. Especially, if they are priced
fairly between $15 to $30 USD. The Mac market is even larger and I've
already gotten over a hundred requests for Mac games alone.

If you consider a game costs $30 and 100 Mac or Linux users buy the
game that is a grose income of $3,000. That is certainly enough to
cover the costs of porting the game to those platforms assuming the
game was designed in such a way that it didn't have to be rewritten
from scratch and only needed some code modifications. As I am looking
at doing just this type of work we will see how it all turns out, but
I do believe there are some people willing to lay some cash on the
line to see it gets done.