Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tanuki" data-source="post: 3772050" data-attributes="member: 37053">Nifft is correct. Writing good multi-platform code is easy, well, not more than 5% harder than writing for a single OS. You just have to design it that way from the beginning. If you isolate things that need to be platform-specific via an abstraction layer, then you have a tiny percent of code that needs to be actually ported. But there are too many badly trained code-slinging monkeys around these days who don't have a clue how to write good code.(Why not just do it in web-hosted Java? Heck, it’s not like the graphics they have shown us have been anything close to impressive. It doesn’t need to be videogame quality, 60 fps 1200x1000 widescreen. How hard is it to display a 3-d field with some static entities on it? Beyond trivial.)So, you want a business case for writing platform-neutral code? Sure, here you go, micro-economics 101: for everyone except the OS vendors, the operating system is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complement_good" target="_blank">complement</a>. As the price of a complement goes down, demand for your product goes up. If Windows were 100% free-as-in-beer, anyone could pick it up and install it solely for the purpose of accessing the DI. Demand for the DI would increase.Since Microsoft will never reduce the cost of Windows, that means the only way for Wizards to reduce the cost of their complement is to expand the options for that complement: making Mac, Linux or Java versions would reduce the cost of the complement to those target consumers using those OS's. Since the price of software development is a fixed cost, the cost of porting to these platforms is negligible compared to the gains, amortized over a sufficient period. As the user-base grows, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect" target="_blank">network externalities</a> grow at a geometric rate, which is just more good news for business.Arguments to the effect of “you knew you were going to be marginalized when you chose a non-monopoly OS” miss one important fact. I made my OS choice (Linux) with the full knowledge that my ability to enjoy one of my favorite hobbies would be entirely unaffected by that decision. Now, since D&D is moving to an online, Windows-only model, Wizards has deliberately <s>and maliciously</s> marginalized my ability to consume their product. So far, everything I hear about 4th edition makes to salivate in anticipation. Except the DI. <s>The DI is just Wizards little way of letting me know that I’ve gone from valued consumer to marginalized non-entity in their brave new world. Nice.</s></blockquote>

Verification