Origin (EA) looks to be scanning your privacy...

I don't think so, unless there were a ton. Look at the console market, games are individually developed for each console. Granted, they all have different architecture so it is a little different.

Your code would not nearly be as optimized if it was not directly written for the platform it was on.

If porting is so easy ~ why do developers not bother making OSX versions of their games?

 

Using OpenGL wouldn't be a problem since it's a suppoted by everything. I was refering more to programming language which most software is written in. In order for it to run on nearly every system it would be a complete pain to make a compiled version for each, leading to the use of intepreted code, which we all know is significantly slower than compiled code since there's an interface in the way.

Assuming games don't make high use of OS libraries then porting shouldn't be too much of an issue so long as the hardware remains fairly consistant. The reason why console ports run badly on PC's is because they have completely different strengths and weaknesses compared to PC's (comparitively beefy processor, very little RAM to work with, different processor achitecture etc.).

 

No it wouldn't. If the code strictly adhered to ANSI standards, it wouldn't take a major rewrite of the code to make it compatible with other platforms and simply recompile. Try to stick to code that is as much as platform independant as possible and it makes the job far easier.

 

I guess that if all future code only relied on its own libraries then it could work quite well, but if there is integration with the OS libraries like most software has then all hell breaks loose.