by , 9:00 AM EST, January 23rd, 2001
Our friends at iDevGames.com have posted an interview that will be of interest to Mac gamers, especially people interested in making Mac games. The site has interviewed Mark Adams, the now-legendary cofounder of Westlake Interactive. Westlake Interactive has been the porting house behind most (but not all) of the top Mac games you have played in the last 3 years, including Deus Ex, The Sims (and Livin' Large), Klingon Honor Guard, Star Trek Voyager - Elite Force, Unreal Tournament, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Civilization: Call To Power, Unreal Mac, Falcon 4.0, Railroad Tycoon II, Deadlock, QuakeWorld Client & Server, Quake Mac, Shadow Warrior, X-Men: Quake add-on, and one of our all-time favorites, Duke Nukem. That's quite the resum�, and it's not actually a complete one.
iDevGames is a site dedicated to providing resources and support for people interested in making Mac games, and this interview deals with a lot of developer issues. Mark Adams has a long history of developing for the Mac, and this interview taps into some of his wisdom that many Mac coders will find invaluable. From the interview:
Which graphics/3D technology/solution do you choose for non-OpenGL games? Are all Direct3D games by default converted to Q3D for example?
Right now we're mostly taking D3D games to OpenGL. Apple's OpenGL drivers have been getting more stable and faster, and since RAVE isn't really a supported technology any more we've decided to go straight to GL in most cases. There are a few exceptions, like Unreal Tournament, which had a very good RAVE code base to start with (from Unreal Mac), and didn't gain anything by playing in OpenGL.Many new programmers ask questions about which language they should learn for game development. Usually, the more experience programmers will then have a debate on C vs C++. What's your opinion on this?
Everyone has a personal preference, I suppose as far as porting existing code, I prefer C over C++, just because the language spec is more standard and there aren't as many wacky extensions in Visual C that choke CodeWarrior like C++. If I was doing original development, I'm a big proponent of object oriented programming (OOP), and would use C++. But I'd be very careful of going overboard with some of the C++ extensions like templates and operator overloading. Not only do you run into portability issues, you can also make code very hard to read and debug by misusing some of the more esoteric C++ extensions.
That's just a small sample, so head over to iDevGames and read the interview.
The Mac platform needs as many programmers as it can get, and frankly lags far behind the Windows world in the number and quality of programming tools and resources. Microsoft may not make a great OS, but they do make it as easy as possible for programmers, even programmers with little talent and fewer skills, to make Windows programs. Microsoft has dedicated mind numbingly tremendous resources to this effort, and despite valiant efforts to catch up on Apple's part during the last three years, and the ever vigilant efforts of Metrowerks, the Mac simply can't match the Windows platform for ease of development. If you doubt this, ask a Mac developer you know what they think. Interestingly, because of all this, having experience developing for the Mac often leads to having more credibility as a top-notch coder in the PC world. To over simplify, this is because you have to be good to make a living developing for the Mac, while that is not as much the case in the Windows market. For the record, we are not saying there are no good Windows coders, just that the average Mac coder has been honed to a finer edge from necessity than the average Windows coder. While we're at it, hats off to John Carmack, one of the greatest programming minds of our time. With that out of the way...
Sites such as iDevGames are important to the Mac because they broaden the resource base available to current and potential developers. This interview with Mark Adams is a great opportunity to glean some wisdom from one of the most experienced Mac game coders on the planet.