Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not a subject matter expert, but I do find it a little odd to read the second half of that. I'd expect, beyond development/debugging, there's certainly a phase of testing that requires hardware that matches your target system?

Like, I get if you develop for consoles, you probably use some kind of emulation on your development workstation, which is probably running Windows. Especially for consoles like XBOX One or newer, and PS4 or newer, which are essentially PCs. And then builds get passed off to a team that has the hardware.

Is anyone developing games for Windows on Apple hardware? Do they run Parallels and call it a day? How is the gaming performance? If the answers to those 3 questions are "yes, yes, great", then Apple supports PC game development better than they support Apple game development?

> Like, I get if you develop for consoles, you probably use some kind of emulation on your development workstation

I don’t think anybody does this. I haven’t heard about official emulators for any of the mainstream consoles. Emulation would be prohibitively slow.

Developers usually test on dedicated devkits which are a version of the target console (often with slightly better specs as dev builds need more memory and run more slowly). This is annoying, slow and difficult, but at least you can get these dev kits, usually for a decent price, and there’s a point to trying to ship on those platforms. Meanwhile, nobody plays games on macs, and Apple is making zero effort to bring in the developers or the gamers. It’s a no-chicken-and-no-egg situation, really.

Basically you are correct, MacOS has to be treated like a console in that way. Except you get all the downsides of that development workflow with none of the upsides. The consoles provide excellent debugging and other tools for targeting their platform, can't say the same for MacOS.

For testing, I can do a large amount of testing in a VM for my game. Maybe not 100% and not full user testing but nothing beats running on the native hardware and alpha/beta with real users.

Also, since I can pass through hardware to my VM I can get quite good performance by passing through a physical GPU for example. This is possible and quite straightforward to do on a Linux host. I'm not sure if it's possible using Parallels.

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