A Technical Question

[Yushatak]

When the Steam version came out, I'd assumed it would be a desktop version of the Chrome version, i.e., one of Google's "Desktop Web App" things. Judging by the bugs being different for each version much of the time, etc., I imagine it may not be.

I was wondering, as a fellow coder, how IS this set up? I imagine it's not a totally different codebase, so how does it work?

Thanks for indulging my curiosity. LOVE this game. :3

[Handsome Matt]

The game is written in C++ I assume and then wrapped in the Native Client wrapper for Chrome or the Steam Wrapper for distribution on Steam. The same code base can be used as they're both written in C++.

[Kevin]

Most of the engine code is the same across the two platforms. There's a layer of platform specific stuff (graphics, input harvesting, system-level calls, etc) that is only compiled into the appropriate version. Our graphics stack is... odd in that it's written all in OpenGL ES (for portability), but then translated to directx on windows by a library called Angle. Chrome also uses this library, internally. Before the last update, the windows version was just using plain-old opengl, but we found that a lot of people have graphics cards with really bad driver support for opengl. Intel makes some really dodgy graphics cards.

The game code is written in Lua, and is the same across the platforms. There's a little bit of specificity to make the front menus look a little different, and the demo code is only active on Chrome.