But Apple can also do its best for developers in a more decent way.

We ported our game from DX9 to OpenGL to make way for Linux and macOS – and once the graphics are working, it’s relatively easy to port the rest too. OpenGL, which was deprecated by Apple, then left the Vulkan consortium to do its own thing (Metal).

We’ve eventually moved to Vulkan (Windows and Linux), but the extra work to support Metal as well is quite a lot of work. As a relatively small company, we don’t do that anymore.

I’m not talking about the inflexibility of the Apple Store. It’s already hard to get approved (think of requiring space-slice joystick support, which Apple wonders if that’s really necessary) and then you have an approved (yet unreleased) game and you want to load an update… You can not. According to Apple, you then have to check out the game and agree to agree again (with the chance of rejection and a missed release date). Very annoying. Look, if I can let a new version pass through approval, and mark the already approved version when denied, fine, but that didn’t work. In all other stores, you can argue with people – Apple is completely inflexible.
We finally released our game, on one island inhabited by about 4,000 people, then uploaded the new version and let it go through approval (if considered we could make already released game public in more countries). Creative turn.

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

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