It certainly is and I'd like to do that from Linux.Complaints about having to use Windows - Let's be clear about this one, having to compile on one platform whilst targetting another is an everyday occurrence.
Edit : that sounded a bit confrontationalwanting to avoid any comparisons between platforms best used for a development workstation, there's a myriad of reasons why you'd want the IDE to work across multiple platforms. Maybe you've got a mac and you don't want to buy a PC, maybe you work in a certain government department (certainly in our country Athena) and you can't even run Windows. Maybe you simply don't have the available hardware making dual-booting just to test your builds a hassle.
The top reason however is debugging (I retract this if Delphi supports remote debugging on every platform). Whilst it might be acceptable to say if it works on A then it works on B, that's under the provision that you're only using officially supported abstractions.
Even if remote debugging *is* supported, unless you can afford multiple machines in which to run concurrently with your windows development environment (Virtual machines not being acceptable as you require direct access to the GPU or at least some people do) you're again stuck.
Mobile phones, game consoles, arcade cabinet hardware - Remote debugging or 'virtually assured' operation is the only viable alternative because those devices are not suitable for use as workstations. Em. expect Mac owners to buy PCs to dev? virtual machines? Windows licences?
Yes their primary market are development studios that have tons of hardware but this is a thread regarding what game devs like us need from Delphi.
I happen to multi-boot various windows versions, Linux and OSX Lion on hardware I selected for that purpous, I purchased my copy of OSX etc and happily run FPC+Lazarus on all envrionments. It's a perfectly valid setup that many people choose.
I could not do that with Delphi in it's current state. It'd take me half a life-time with all the re-boots just to debug my Cocoa framework interface and Linux isn't even supported.
That really doesn't seem like a good thing to me, I'm not buying it am I? I don't see how that makes good business sense, I mean who's choosing not to buy something because it *does* support other platforms?
And if it's just a case of time + money and they can't afford to do it? well I'm not jumping on a sinking ship. And if it's for technical reasons that can't be overcome? well then Lazarus+FPC is superior (for my needs) and there's no reason to switch.
Now I don't really believe that those suggestions are the case, there's many factors at play I simply don't know anything about.
But the question what game devs need from Delphi?
The answer is simply : What we already get from FPC+Lazarus plus a ton more that will justify the cost.
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Originally Posted by phibermon
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