Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Creating a Mac OS X Port of OpenFracas

During the course of development of OpenFracas, we have returned again and again to the idea of distributing the game for OS X. It was our original goal to support all 3 of the major operating systems: Linux, Windows, and OS X.

OpenFracas has been developed using fairly open and portable technologies (Ruby and the GTK) and so the idea was good in theory, but in practice it proved more difficult. OpenFracas was developed first for Linux, with a Windows port being quite easy to make. We both have a free legal copy of Windows XP provided to us, so porting the game to Windows wasn't a problem. Mac OS X, on the other hand, is proving to be more difficult.

Creating the port for OS X requires access to OS X, which in turn requires a Mac, since that is all that OS X will run on. We think that we have a complicated series of instructions that, if followed, will allow the game to run on OS X, but without a Mac, we cannot verify these steps. Without trying these steps, we cannot move beyond it to a more seamless installer for our programme.

Neither of us are really up to spending the kind of money required to buy a new computer just to create the Mac port of OpenFracas. So we're asking anyone reading this who is interested in helping us out, give us a shout - we'd love to hear from you, and hopefully we'll be able to get the game up and running with your help.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I'm willing to give it a try! :-)