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Comment by edfletcher_t137 | Hacker News Reader

> At the moment, the only supported platform is Linux.

Regardless of your feelings on the status quo, there is one thing you must do when building a game engine if you want it to succeed: support Windows.

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I'd love to see the Steam Deck "console" change this status quo.

Most of the SteamDeck games are just running windows games through photon, wine and other compatibility layers.

While that works amazingly well, I tend to prefer games with native Linux and SteamOS builds, even though they're rare.

win32 is the stable ABI for SteamOS, same as any other Linux distro

bullshit, consoles/mobile are bigger markets than PC/Windows

PC is just less than 1/3 of the whole picture

https://www.data.ai/en/insights/mobile-gaming/2022-gaming-sp...

I feel like it's a mistake to consider mobile games as being part of the same market as PC/console games.

Sure they're both "games" but I don't know that they're competing for the same set of users - either people play one or the other, or the people that do crossover in both markets are probably playing PC/console games at home and mobile games on the bus or train.

Got bad news for you about what the console SDKs run on

(Also, the consoles don't run Linux)

From what I know:

XBOX runs a variant of Windows.

PS3/4/5 OSes have all been based on FreeBSD.

Apparently Nintendo Switch runs a proprietary kernel, which is interesting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_softwar...).

A bit more than that since Xbox runs Windows too.

July console sales:

PS5: 1.2m

Switch: 950k

Xbox: 370k

Xbox accounts for just 17% of total console sales in July

Both Switch and PS5 are FreeBSD based

If we count the whole period of the current gen of each vendors, it only accounts for 13%, it's not big

https://www.vgchartz.com/

And what about actual game sales and revenue through things like GamePass. It doesn't help your game if a million people bought a Nintendo Switch if 80% of them only buy Pokémon, Mario Kart and Zelda.

Actually its only the PS5 that's FreeBSD based. Switch runs a completely proprietary Nintendo OS that borrows a lot from Android.

A mix of the two

"partially Unix-like via certain components which are based on FreeBSD and Android"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_softwar...

from the same article

"it is based on a proprietary microkernel"

"....Despite popular misconceptions to the contrary, Horizon (the Switch's OS) is not largely derived from FreeBSD code, nor from Android..."

It borrows very little from Android - I think it mostly draws some parts from stagefright.

Also borrows the whole of its compositor "nvnflinger" from Android's "SurfaceFlinger".

I'd call that a pretty significant piece.

A special flavour of Windows.

He's probably referring to the Desktop/laptop market. In which case windows controls like 90%.

Title is: "Peredvizhnikov Engine is a fully lock-free game engine written in C++20 "

A Game Engine targets various platforms

A "video-game" is not something exclusive to desktop/laptop windows market

Right but a toolchain that targets anything else other then a desktop is not straightforward to find or setup.

Toy game engines like this are in the majority of cases used on desktop.

Rude way of putting it, but yeah, mobile dwarfs everything.

Pretty sure they already succeeded. Wasting effort supporting an advertising platform like windows is irrelevant to whether or not they successfully made a lock-free game engine.

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