No Macs? Holy crap did WotC do the math wrong!

[Glyfair]

I never said that, but in my experience in a PC household there is often at least one person who is pretty tech savvy and is willing to set things up for non-techies in the house. In Mac households it much more likely that nobody is.

My experience is different. I know a lot of households that were dragged into the computer age by necessity rather than by desire. All of them have Windows based computers.

 

[wedgeski]

These two decisions would have been the right decisions, but the hegemony is so pervasive that people don't even think about it.

Between this and the righteous fury of the 'MicroEc-101' poster (I'd love to see the project case made at Wizards using that kind of thinking), these threads don't half make me laugh. There are plain, sensible business reasons for *not* engaging in cross-platform dev that have everything to do with risk aversion and nothing whatsoever to do with Mac vs. PC ideologies or the Wintel 'hegemony'.

Theory is pointless. At the end of the day, these guys are spending millions of dollars on the DI and they have to measure the risk and relative expense of cross-platform dev against the likely increase in revenue that risk will attract. Aside from the OP's point, which is a good one, such decisions are normally very easy, and they don't come down on the side of Mac or Linux users. Maybe Wizards haven't considered all of the facts. Only time will tell.

 

[Baron Opal]

Can DDI be a success with only 50% of the market? Or is WotC expecting these groups to say sayonara to their mac-using buddies?

Either way, for a company that's normally very good at recognizing the gaming group--not the gaming individual--as the key unit, I think they've made a fairly serious miscalculation.

You're nuts. If half of the people who buy a Player's Handbook become members of DDI WotC will be ecstatic!

 

[ThirdWizard]

It's not that hard to write good software. Why don't more developers do that?

Ignoring the fact that I think it is difficult to write good software, my answer to this is that corporate culture discourages good software from being written when mediocre code will suffice and is generally accepted by users.

Based on my experience, the virtual gaming table is most likely built on top of an old prototype hastily thrown together using DirectX that was never even meant to see use.

In java, the programmer literally has no control over when or how memory is cleaned up. None whatsoever. With windows (or mac, for that matter), you have much more control; full control for windows, I'm not sure the extent of it for mac. That's what I was referring to.

The GC is here to stay and isn't going away. It's the revolution. Memory management being abstracted away makes writing code much more productive and less buggy. That's why .NET uses GC.

 

[Oldtimer]

My biggest concern, though, is that WotC is actually developing for DX10, which would require Vista.

Again, they are not. It's DX9.

 

[Tanuki]

the righteous fury of the 'MicroEc-101' poster (I'd love to see the project case made at Wizards using that kind of thinking),

I made a series of rational, not furious, and well-reasoned points. I have yet to see a counter-argument to the economic argument besides the "Wizards knows what they are doing." non-argument, or to the other points I made, besides Mustrum Ridcully's fine response regarding the difficulties of porting. Did you even understand my economics argument? Or are you content with your ad hominem?

 

[CleverName]

Oh, what the heck:

Your favorite OS sucks.



If you can't beat 'em....

 

[Crazy Jerome]

It's not that hard to write good software. Why don't more developers do that?

Because often developers are working on a project that is not sufficiently funded to have good software. Specifically, the customer wants a bunch of stuff that he didn't pay for, he wants to change his mind at the last minute, and he doesn't want to pay for any overhead. But he still wants his product delivered on time.

The DI could be worse. It could be that WotC and the software contractors were using government bid procedures and processes, and had the Federal audit folks looking over their shoulders the whole time, while they developed something against a spec designed by a bunch of software professors that have never worked in the real world. It would definitely be cross-platform, but the final spec would clear the final committee about the time 5E hit the shelves.

 

[Tanuki]

Oh, what the heck:

Your favorite OS sucks.



If you can't beat 'em....

QFT!!!!

 

[gizmo33]

The GC is here to stay and isn't going away. It's the revolution. Memory management being abstracted away makes writing code much more productive and less buggy. That's why .NET uses GC.

Yea, Java itself is just a programming language and the problems that browsers have with applets and such is outside of the scope of what a language is really responsible for. The problem that I see is that there essentially is very little in the way of standards that have developed for applications. The "write-once run anywhere" thing runs into a problem when a certain OS/browser just doesn't implement things according to what the standards say it should (when the standards even exist) - and now you've invested $$ into developing a solution and your response is going to be to point the finger at a particular OS/browser manufacturer and say "it's their fault"? That's not going to get you your $$$ back. IME cross-platform development is risky in that all of the problems that you encounter will not be of your own making as you are often testing a vendors implementation of a standard.

Also, platforms often have features unique to themselves. Writing cross platform means taking a lowest-common-denominator approach to features. It's also hard for platform-generic code to make efficient use of platform-specific optimization, which I think would be an issue in something like a Java to Direct X bridge.

Although it's a shame that some software isn't written for the Mac, I can understand why it happens.