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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

The example of Halo for xbox has the important distinction that Halo was an exclusive title.

Almost by it's very nature Linux is not conductive to exclusive software, simply because when you build something for Linux you are likely building on top of open source dependencies which have far less legal and technical barriers to being ported elsewhere.

For example most Windows titles rely on DirectX which is only supported on MS systems. If the game development culture on Windows revolved around OpenGL we would likely have seen more Mac/Linux ports of games already.

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> when you build something for Linux you are likely building on top of open source dependencies which have far less legal and technical barriers to being ported elsewhere.

Naah, not a problem, just require systemd.

I disagree with that, as the open source dependencies of a major game application are tiny compared to the application itself.

Porting something Linux -> Windows is likely much easier than the other way around. For example you can run GTK/QT on Windows but you can't run Win32 on Linux without relying on something like Wine.

So you would need to have something that was either designed to be cross platform from the get-go , or you need to re-engineer around different APIs.

The fact that it's easier to port from Linux to Windows, could be great incentive to build for Linux first then port out. As a converted Ubuntu user for the past 1.5 years, I'm rooting for this to happen. I could fully drop Windows if it does.

The lack of Win32 API is not a big deal porting-wise.

If you application is built on top of Win32 (or some other proprietary API)?

Games generally use far less of it than a normal GUI application would.

There have been applications that have been ported to Linux through using Wine as a library. Alternatively, if your app is c#, you can use the system.windows.forms stuff in Mono.

> Porting something Linux -> Windows is likely much easier than the other way around.

True I'd say (though I have no experience in porting huge software projects), but why is this? Isn't it just because the Windows platform is so much larger? I guess Linux will still keep things open since it's not part of a for-profit company, but easy portability to Windows in the future is no given unless Microsoft starts to make things that way.

And I mean "future", like, when Microsoft's lock-in products like Office and Windows have a <50% market share. After that it'll be over soon altogether, or Microsoft must come up with something brilliant.

Hmm, something brilliant that must be. In the past they bought stuff they didn't have themselves. Good luck buying (and selling) LibreOffice or GNU/Linux :D

It's all dependent on vendor choice. Nothing says they have to use GTK, QT, or any other multi-platform windowing toolkit, and if they do, nothing says that they have to build and distribute Windows or OS X versions of their software. It's just as easy to say "Windows apps written in QT are really easy to port to Linux" as the other way around. If someone writes their own code to address X11 directly, Windows wouldn't be able to run the software without an X Server, which requires the installation of a bunch of other crap through cygwin and would still probably have performance issues (that is, it'd be very much like using WINE to play Windows games, but probably much crappier).

A Linux exclusive can be made, and running an unauthorized "Windows port" can easily be made to exceed the technical skillset of your average gamer.

So you say people would port the necessary Linux userspace, and thereby Valve's platform over to other operating systems.

How would that not be a huge win for the platform? Unlike Microsoft or Sony, Valve is mainly in the business of selling games not platforms.

Later Halo franchise games were X-Box only, but given that I played the entire game on Windows, I think I can confirm that the original Halo was not an X-box exclusive. (It was the only console it was released for, though, so in that sense it was more exclusive than games which are ported for all three console platforms.)

Halo supports both Windows and Mac. Halo 2 was ported to windows. Halo 3 was the first Xbox(360) exclusive.

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