Are there plans for the D&D tools to be made available for the Mac Platform?

Post/Author/DateTimePost
#1

xpatricklee

Nov 24, 2009 15:06:01

I know its a long shot but hey, figured I might as well ask. I've been reluctant to put any windows OS for various reasons. Not because I'm not a fan of windows, simply because I'd prefer to simply use 1 OS instead of repartitioning my HD and dealing with boot menu issues which have cropped up in the past. 

Thanks for any news,
-B 

#2

mudbunny

Nov 25, 2009 8:51:11 		This is from one of the (ex)-devs on DDI and macs:

I would have love to have done a mac version. I have a mac. I also have an iphone.

When I originally joined the project though I was given a 6 month time frame to full release, 3 months to beta, and by the way, that includes the time I could spend hiring a staff. Staff was, fortunately, hired in short order, and I was lucky to get some great people on the team. With the short schedule though we were making decisions between releasing it as a web app, or perhaps winforms. We mocked up a web app and it wasn't responsive enough, we mocked up a winforms prototype, and it was slow and lacked the ability to do all the things we wanted to do so we ported to WPF which set us back a week but was so worth it. We were able to do more things, have better control of the UI and development time was very fast.

Given the short schedule that we had it wouldn't have been reasonable to make a multi-platform version. Once we were done with the initial build I did cost out what it would take to make a mac version, as I think it is short sighted not to make one. The problem being that Wizards just doesn't have enough mac customers yet. They would need something like 10 times as many in order for it to break even, and that's not counting the fact that the majority of mac users can run windows apps in some sort of vm setup.

It's also entirely possible that by the time there are enough mac customers there will also be either native osx support for wpf, or some sort of rapid development tool for mac/iphone that could be trivially ported too. It's also possible that with the coming release of windows7 that XP will drop in price so much that it doesn't make sense not to have a copy running in a vm with your mac.



In other words, it is not likely. That isn't to say that sometime down the road, they may do so, but for now, WotC is focussing on getting the applications out.