Mac OS X support?

[sonywws]

Mac OS X support?

[Ron2]

Hello,

That's a good question and we got asked that a lot at the Game Developers Conference last week. For the whole framework, the short answer is "no". There are lots of pieces that could run fine on Mono, but no one has made a serious effort to port all of ATF to Mono, that I'm aware of.

Here are the issues that I can think of:

1. ATF has some Win32 dependencies. It's not a lot, but if you do a search on DllImport, you'll see that we've had to go outside the .NET Framework occasionally.
2. We use Direct2D for the circuit editor and timeline editor, and that might be tricky to work with a DirectX emulator on Mac OS X, like Wine. I'm not aware of anyone having tried Wine with ATF.
3. There's some native code in our \ThirdParty library, like for Perforce support.
4. The project files are for Visual Studio, which is not available for the Mac.

There are probably other issues, too, which I can't think of at the moment.

[lordmortis]

Question: Stirfire studios primarily uses Mac OS X as the development platform (but 90% of our tools are cross platform) - if we manage to get this version of ATF working in Mac OS X (Mono) and windows (Visual Studio) - would you guys be interested in the Pull Request?

[Ron2]

Wow, thank you for asking and I'm impressed that you would undertake the effort.

Please let me know how much progress you make and which pieces you can port. Our group is currently 100% Windows-based, and it would take some effort to get going on the Mac, like setting up a build server, for example. And we'll have to consider the cost of maintaining a new platform. If you can get significant pieces working (especially some Direct2D-related components) on OS X and Mono, with at most minor breaking changes for existing clients, then, yes, we would be interested in the pull request.

Thanks!

[claytoncrowden]

@lordmortis @StirfireStudios we are also in a similar situation as you and are seriously considering a OSX/Mono port. Have you guys started working on the port ? we'd be happy to help!

[lordmortis]

Yeah we're still working on it - @jethac was mainly doing that work, not sure how far he got but we definitely want to finish it to build tools for our next game!

Our fork is here

[amerkoleci]

Your fork has no change about Mac OSX.

[enjoyon]

@lordmortis and @jethac how's the port for Mac OS X going on? I would be very interested in if you where able to port it, and if so if your port is available for share?
Thanks.