What platform are your running?

[Sin]

I'm not sure if this has been polled before, but I'm curious to see what the Ren'py demographic looks like in terms of platform. Please let me know ^_^

[Jake]

I'm not sure if this has been polled before, but I'm curious to see what the Ren'py demographic looks like in terms of platform. Please let me know ^_^

Shouldn't this be a multiple-selectable-options poll? I mean - I run OSX and Windows, I'm sure there are others with access to more than one platform...

[Sin]

Sure, but I'm interested in peoples primary gaming platforms. If you had to choose between your Mac and your PC, or between Linux and Windows.

I want to know if there are anyone who plays exclusively on Linux or Macs. Like I know Ren'py is platform independent but I'm curious to see how many people actually take advantage of that feature.

[bloodywyvern]

I personally run Vista only because it came with the computer, I could care less what OS I'm using as long as what I need it to do, is done.

[Jake]

Sure, but I'm interested in peoples primary gaming platforms. If you had to choose between your Mac and your PC, or between Linux and Windows.

But that's a question driven more by circumstance than personal preference - if I was playing a game which only ran on OSX, for example, I'd elect to play it on my Mac; if I was playing one which only ran under Windows, I would play it in Windows.

If I'm playing a game which could feasibly run under both, then which one I play it on depends as much on where I am as what my preference is. If I'm at home at my desk, then probably Windows, because my desktop is a Windows machine; if I'm not, then likely the Mac, since that's a laptop and thus portable - and the battery lasts about twice as long in OSX.

(To be perfectly honest, my primary gaming platform is probably the XBox 360 or the Wii, depending on the season. I don't play much on PCs at all.)

[PyTom]

Okay, I just crunched the numbers for renai.us in March-to-date. I took a look at games where all three versions of the game are available (shown by having a mac version that's been downloaded at least once).

We've had 1805 downloads. They broke down as:

1324 (73%) Windows
241 (13%) Mac
240 (13%) Linux

Or as a chart:



So when Linux and Mac versions are available, a substantial fraction of people download them. I'm actually surprised at how much Linux downloads have increased since the last time I ran these stats. I don't recall the actual numbers, but back then it was 90-9-1 Windows-Mac-Linux.

[RidleyWright]

I personally run Vista only because it came with the computer, I could care less what OS I'm using as long as what I need it to do, is done.

Seconded. My laptop runs Vista and the computers at home both run XP.

[Sin]

PyTom: That's really useful information, thanks.

[risingbamboobanana]

i'm pretty much computer-illiterate, but vista! D: sometimes i feel like killing it, if it weren't always dying on its own already! i miss XP.

[Hentai Senshi]

Sure, but I'm interested in peoples primary gaming platforms. If you had to choose between your Mac and your PC, or between Linux and Windows.

I want to know if there are anyone who plays exclusively on Linux or Macs. Like I know Ren'py is platform independent but I'm curious to see how many people actually take advantage of that feature.

*raises hand* Linux as primary gaming platform here. Followed by consoles. I only use Windows when I need to test something (which generally means that either I'm trying to sell it to Windows users or somebody has been hitting me on the head and demanding I TEST THEIR THING NOOOW for a while beforehand.)

Asking 'primary' rather than 'preferred' will tend to give you numbers skewed heavily in favour of Windows, since Windows-only games outnumber Linux-only or Mac-only ones and most Linux users have dual boot systems or multiple computers. (I'm not sure about the prevalence of Windows on Intel Macintoshes, but dual boot Win/Mac systems seem pretty common here.)

[mikey]

There might also be this to consider: Since Linux or Mac is often also regarded as a statement, their users will IMO be more likely to point out they use Linux and Mac than Windows users will be to point out they use Windows. I use Windows, and I'm not too keen on voting in polls on this, since it's the mainstream thing.

As for RAA downloads - I often download all 3 distributions, just in case, and I'm willing to bet a lot of people do the same - so it doesn't mean that say 100 Linux downloads automatically mean 100 people have Linux as their main PC gaming platform.

Another thing to consider will also be that as this is (let's say) a game developer forum, many members are quite "tech-savvy", so they will have experimented with freeware Linuxes or what have you - so asking results from here is not necessarily the representative picture when it somes to players, especially potential players out of the typical niche circles (like VN forums).

All in all though (looking at the first post), we're still talking about Ren'Py, right? No other engine will let you make Linux and Mac distributions with such ease - and to be honest it's purely due to Ren'Py that there even are English VNs for Linux and Mac. So I don't really see a hugely practical application of the results of the poll above - maybe only in the question whether makers should offer all 3 Ren'Py platform builds of their games on their websites, or not. Ren'Py generates them automatically, so really, the only question is whether it's "rentable" to upload and host have two more versions on your website.

[Sin]

Asking 'primary' rather than 'preferred' will tend to give you numbers skewed heavily in favour of Windows, since Windows-only games outnumber Linux-only or Mac-only ones and most Linux users have dual boot systems or multiple computers.

I'm aware of that and that's on purpose.
I'm developing a windows-only visual novel engine and I want to see how many people there are that are not running windows in any shape of form. Linux users are a gray area because the majority of them usually dual boot. I wanted people who vote for Linux to either not run windows at all or simply be the kind that refuse to boot windows.

The same goes for Mac users. A lot of them have a PC "on the side".

This is not an attempt to belittle Linux or Mac users. This kind of information is useful for me for making better decisions in my development. To put it bluntly: what is the real gain of going platform independent.

There is a difference in this poll and PyTom's data though, where non-windows users take up 26%. Sure, this poll has a much smaller population but you'd still think Linux/Mac would score higher.

[Jake]

I'm developing a windows-only visual novel engine and I want to see how many people there are that are not running windows in any shape of form.

Then... wouldn't that have been a better question to ask? "Are you capable of running Windows games?" or something? I guess some of the time you'd get a selection bias towards non-Windows users, but it's always seemed to me that this forum tends to be pretty participatory in that kind of thing.

Linux users are a gray area because the majority of them usually dual boot.

(As it goes, I think offhand I know only two Linux users who dual-boot, and one of them dual-boots into OSX...)

To put it bluntly: what is the real gain of going platform independent.

I thought you'd been coding in DirectX? Would it be that easy to move to be platform-independent anyway?

(Personally I've found the 'real' gain of going platform-independent is that I can get the aforementioned Linux/OSX guy to help script the game...

[Sin]

I thought you'd been coding in DirectX? Would it be that easy to move to be platform-independent anyway?

No, you're right. It would be quite hard. This poll is just about gathering information.
Of course, there are a number of obvious benefits with going multi-platform but I'm trying to gauge how much that stuff really matters in the big picture.

I was also interested to see if anyone was still running Windows 98. I already know Novelty runs in XP & Vista but I haven't tested in 98.

[PyTom]

Linux users are a gray area because the majority of them usually dual boot.

I'd say that's probably not the case anymore, at least for the sort of person who describes themselves as a Linux user. (As opposed to someone who might dabble from time to time.)

More likely, but not super-likely, is that the user will use something like VMware to have a virtualized Windows... but such virtualized environments tend to have lousy or no support for Direct3D and OpenGL acceleration.

This is not an attempt to belittle Linux or Mac users. This kind of information is useful for me for making better decisions in my development. To put it bluntly: what is the real gain of going platform independent.

Well, at least when it came to Ren'Py, platform independent was the natural way to go. All the tools and libraries I used were at least nominally platform independent, so making it cross-platform was a simple matter of producing appropriate builds. (The fact that my primary platform has been Linux for a decade and a half also pushed me in this direction.)

It makes porting to new platforms easier. (Even though I currently have no plans to do it, porting Ren'Py to platforms like the iPhone or game consoles wouldn't be that hard.)

My gut feeling is that since platforms like Linux and Mac are smaller, your games are generally one of only a few VNs available for that platform. So we wind up taking up a larger mindshare of a smaller platform, if that makes sense.

If someone released a fully-open-source (as opposed to Creative Commons) VN, it would be possible to have it included in at least Debian and Ubuntu, which can give it roughly two-click availability to more than six million users.

Linux users actually say "thank you" from time to time, for supporting their platform.

There is a difference in this poll and PyTom's data though, where non-windows users take up 26%. Sure, this poll has a much smaller population but you'd still think Linux/Mac would score higher.

Well, my data was as accurate as I can make it. The only bias I can think of is that I only included games that had at least one mac download... but this seems to have been the case for all cross-platform games in the RAA.

One thing to consider... seeing how widely Vista has been panned, do you really want to hitch your wagon to Microsoft's star?