Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by curyous 3879 days ago
So he's got a working port on an OS he's never seen before, in only 1 week? Does that seem extraordinarily productive to anyone else?
5 comments

Just the title screen, not a complete port. Nor would 1FPS be probably considered "working" :)

He put the OS glue in place in 1 week and that sounds about right for this sort of effort, given some prior experience with writing portable code. The bulk of effort was spent earlier on abstracting principal code from the platform specifics, and sounds like he did all the right things there. Good stuff.

He is extremely productive, to be fair - "Shining Rock Software" is only him, the entire game, pretty successful on Steam, is just coded and maintained by him.
It's an absorbing simcity-esque game, as long as you don't go in expecting Civ/SimCity replay value it's definitely worth it if you like those type of games, or at the very least putting on your wishlist for the steam winter sale.

The level of quality for a one-person team is phenomenal.

Oh, I agree.
It's not working. It just rendered. Like the author said, it's mostly just moving the core c++ codebase in then futzing with xcode to get it to build. If you can use *nix you can use OSX.

I'm curious about his opinions on OSX after he's gotten the game to run with sound and above 1FPS.

Not really. One of the major parts of the OSX port is opengl support which he has been working on since at least March. http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/2015-03-14-porting-opengl...
If you have written your game with a good api layer that shield you from platform specificity, I can't imagine why it would take that long to port... It's mostly SMOP
That's what most PC developers think until they hit their first Console port.

Correct data organization is critical for getting this right. The PS3 was particularly brutal in this respect since it forced you to segment your computations in 256kb chunks(to fit in the SPU).

Fair point, I've never done any console dev. On the PC, it's really only code related to the way you might alloc memory, files, and some other io related tasks...
He had done most of the work on Windows beforehand (OpenGL, implementing his own portable shading language, UTF-8 etc).