Do Team StoneHearth have any incentive to move out of alpha?

[RepeatPan]

@YetiChow

but how many do what Stonehearth does?

Stonehearth’s engine is not that sophisticated. The majority of SH’s logic is written as content, the engine itself does little more than rendering, hosting of lua and the server backend for calls, and utilizing Chromium for the UI. All of these things are either available for other engines or can be added onto them, similar to what they had to do for their own engine in the first place.

You can’t really argue that Radiant created an engine that was impossible to compare to the big players, which can easily throw a lot more resources at the development than they ever could.

@YetiChow

but what I’m saying is that at least they’re not building their engine in a way that relies on a specific platform

Pure speculation. There’s no way we can know that they’re doing that, and there’s no way to know that they are not doing that. At least, for us there is no way to figure that out. For all we know, they could happily utilize the Win32 API and we wouldn’t even necessarily know about it.

@YetiChow

well, that’s true for the time being

Except that you completely ignored my part about tooling, CI and similar, which is not, or might not, be portable at all. There’s quite a significant amount of time invested into SHED alone, which is code that cannot be ported. Sure, it can be ported to another GUI altogether, but that won’t come easy nor cheap.

[oldmacman]

@YetiChow

Every step towards a finished Stonehearth on Windows is equally a step towards a finished Stonehearth on Mac and Linux; at this point the two other platforms are proceeding at the same pace relative to the Windows build. The Windows build simply got a head start on the other two; all three have been advancing at the same rate for a long time and will continue to do so while the game is being “filled in”

Eh, the Linux and macOS ports are not proceeding at all, that is the elements that are distinct to macOS and Linux.

[coasterspaul]

I do wonder if it would ever be worth it to do a one-time port while development’s still going. Best case, they could have a version on Mac/Linux that should still be playable [even though it wouldn’t be updated with the PC version] for a while and might be useful for finding platform-specific bugs to solve later. Worst case, they can keep it secret and use what they learned to rewrite any code that’s causing trouble so it’s easier to port at the end.