Bellatrix VanFeldt
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Posted - 2006.06.28 02:43:00 -
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This thread is most likely dead but damn, how hilarious. I'm been a professional game dev for 12+ years and have used QT, SDL, OpenAL, OpenGL, DirectX, plus too many other platform-specific APIs to even try and recount. I've worked on console games, PC first-person shooters, massively multiplayer games, sports games, pretty much everything. I've owned my own game company as well. So I feel qualified to discuss both the business and technical aspects of this issue.
Capitalism is becoming ever more present because it is a more efficient economic engine than socialism. Though there are numerous downsides to capitalism, CCP is operating in a profit-oriented, customer-directed economic regime and they must take that into account to keep funding the development of Eve. This means fundamentally that they bring the product to the customer. Right now the vast majority of customers are windows users. It also means that they are a consumer of programming talent. That talent pool is larger for windows developers and larger for DirectX developers. There is a lot of DirectX developer skill inertia to be overcome switching to OpenGL. Even though OpenGL has some tangible benefits in extendability and portability, the economic cost of switching far exceeds the extent of these benefits.
Finally I will address the issue of changing engines. Have you heard of a little game called "Duke Nukem Forever"? The "Forever" part comes from switching engines. "If it had been correctly designed you could easily switch the engine out" you might say. But building a game with that sort of flexibility requires at least 50% more work upfront and usually at least twice the work and is not worthwhile unless you need your backend to support three or more different engines. Clearly given the current market this is unreasonable.
In my mind, CCP should be expending their efforts fixing the huge number of longstanding bugs and annoyances in the game, then offering content improvements, and as its lowest priority considering ports to other systems.
Bella
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