What would have happened without the high failure rates?

[MikeB]

@ Legend11

"Axel Deising:
The Mac version of "Shogo: Mobile Armor Division" and the LithTech engine it is based on, is coming along nicely although it was somewhat delayed (2-3 weeks) because of our contract-work on LithTech V2. The Mac (and Linux) port is based on the sources of the Amiga port which is nearing completion. Most of the work required to get Shogo and LithTech to run on Mac, Amiga or Linux is identical: removing Windows dependencies of all sorts (Direct3D to OpenGL, MFC etc.), removing Visual C++ dependencies, implementing a DLL-mechanism etc."

"HJF: Shogo was a lot more difficult in almost any aspect. It was written for DirectX, whereas Heretic II was using the OpenGL API. DirectX does a lot of things completely different. Furthermore, it also uses DirectSound (Heretic II's sound system is much simpler) and DirectInput. It used Windows dialog code and the Microsoft Foundation classes. There was also some issues with it being Visual C++, which has some, well, strange "features". All this was hard to port, this is the reason why it took us so long."

Basically, porting DirectX games involves a lot of rewriting to open standards and if needed custom implementations. DirectX was never designed to make cross platform development easy. Due to the Windows monopoly, to implement things very differently compared the rest of the industry allows them to keep Windows games for itself or cause Windows games to take a long time to port to alternatives. DirectX is closed Microsoft technology and is unavailable for rival platforms.

Developing cross platform games on the PS3 is a much better approach and will yeild much better results for PS3 as well as 360 games (much better efficiency).