The Challenges of Porting Games to macOS: Apple’s Need to Support Vulkan

But Apple can also do their best for developers a little more decently.

We’ve ported our game from DX9 to OpenGL to pave the way for Linux and macOS – and once the graphics work, it’s relatively easy to port the rest as well. OpenGL, which was deprecated by Apple, and then left the Vulkan consortium to do their own thing (Metal).

We eventually switched to Vulkan (Windows & Linux), but the additional work to also support Metal is really too much work. As a relatively small company, we no longer do that.

I’m not talking about the inflexibility of the Apple store. It is already difficult to get through the approval (think of a request for joystick support for a space sim, which Apple questions whether that is really necessary) and then you have an approved game (not yet released) and want uploading an update… You can’t. According to Apple, you then have to withdraw the game and proceed with approval again (with the chance of rejection and a missed release date). Very annoying. Look, if I can let a new version go through approval, and select the already approved version in case of rejection, fine, but that didn’t work. At all other stores you can argue with people – Apple is completely inflexible.
We finally released our game, on 1 island with ~4000 inhabitants, and then uploaded the new version and let it go through approval (if it were considered, we could make the already released game public in more countries). A creative detour.

Instead of “developers should try harder”, I think Apple should try harder. If they supported Vulkan it would take like 80% of the work out of ports.

[Reactie gewijzigd door rboerdijk op 7 juni 2023 21:46]