Coldstone's front end was developed with REALbasic, IIRC. Even though RB can produce Wintel executables, the lack of a debug environment on that side would make a professional release questionable at best...

Until now. REALsoftware announced that, as of RB 5.0 early next year, they will ship a Windows native IDE. Egad! The horror!

Seriously, though, given Ambrosia's recent openness towards the Windows platform and Beenox's console/Windows experience, does anyone here think that a Windows native ColdStone IDE will be made next year?

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Beenox was working on a Windows version, but due to limitations in RB (most likely the one you mentioned) they haven't pushed it out the door yet. So, it could happen...maybe even Real Soon Now™

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Not likely. Beenox is not known to be complete idiots, so I'd guess they will come out with a bug fix update—perhaps even an upgrade (hint, hint) before they spend time on the Windows version.

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Quote

Originally posted by Cafalll:
Not likely. Beenox is not known to be complete idiots, so I'd guess they will come out with a bug fix update—perhaps even an upgrade (hint, hint) before they spend time on the Windows version.

I wouldn't equate idiotism with capitilism, Cafalll.

If they release a bug fix, or even a non-payware upgrade, then they see no return on their time spent(even though they really need to do it).

If they release a windows version then they will see an instant return on their work, get some cash flow, and have extra incentives to be devoting additional time to bug fixing, upgrades, etc.

(edit) Realized some might take a bit of the banter as anything other than humorous as I intended, so I removed it. hehe (/edit)
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(This message has been edited by Stark Bledfast (edited 10-03-2002).)

It was recently announced that RealBasic development suite is being ported to Windows. If anything, this should help alleve some of the problems with compiling the Coldstone Development App for Windows. Contrary to what seems to be popular opinion, I see this as a good thing, for two reasons:

1. Beenox will get more cashflow from Coldstone, and have a greater incentive to spend more time updating it, perhaps even a 2.0 version with many new features.

2. More games for the Mac. Anybody putting the time into creating a game with Coldstone, and refusing to release a version for the platform they don't prefer probably doesn't have their head screwed on straight.
   a) If they are charging money for their game, $1200 on a lower-end iMac for testing purposes is probably a good investment, because it will allow them to sell more games.
   If their game is being released as freeware, and they can still "compile" it and rely on Coldstone users who use the other platform to help them get it running properly. Considering that one generally wants to make a game to garner respect from the community, there is little incentive other than adolescent "L337"-ness to compile the game ONLY for one platform.

Coldstone is the best game engine out there that doesn't require you to learn to program, period. I know, I've tried them, even ones like RPGMaker on Windows. Unless you're a member of the hard-core coder cadre (and have some serious programming talent), your only other real options for writing a game of this sort are RealBasic and/or Director/Flash, neither of which come with an out-of-the-box engine for making adventure games. I won't go into the problems of using RealBasic for games, but Director, aside from being slow, has draconian licensing terms for products that use it.

I can only see good aspects of having the Coldstone Dev Application ported to Windows, but then again, I'm a pragmatist.

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Don't count on me.

It took three major releases of RB to finally get it to work correctly on OSX. We'll see in 3 years for Windows...

There is a version of Coldstone almost working for windows sitting on our server (that has been used by Dan to work on plugins for PoG). However, I've been too busy wrestling with RB on OSX to get Coldstone working on anything else.

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Dee Brown
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(This message has been edited by Dee (edited 10-04-2002).)

Just wanted to say, Dee, that even though we whine and complain a lot - Coldstone rocks and we can't thank you enough for it.

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