[FEATURE REQUEST] Cross-platform support

rehtlaw commented 8 months ago

I would love to see another option for chart editors that can also be used on Mac and Linux (especially since wine doesn't play nice with newer .NET versions). Grepping through the code, I didn't see too much windows specific that would have to be replaced outside of compiler options and I guess window creation, but I also have little to no C# (and especially MonoGame) experience, so I can't tell how much work it would be to rewrite the windows specific parts to work cross-platform.

PerryAsleep commented 8 months ago

A few folks have mentioned they'd like this feature. It's not an insurmountable problem, but it also wouldn't be quick. Some considerations:

C# and dot net are multiplatform, so I'm not too worried about that.
Monogame supports Linux and macOS but I imagine there will be a lot of bumps in the road getting that set up.
Currently the application uses DirectX. It would need to swapped to something like OpenGL. Monogame should make this not too bad.
Shaders are in HLSL but I think Monogame transpiles them so this may not be an issue.
Would need to do a pass on the third party libraries but that should really just be fmod and Dear ImGui and I don't think either of those would be problematic.
Some assumptions sprinkled throughout the application that it is on Windows. Window resizing and drag+drop handling come to mind.
This is just a personal obstacle but I'd need to set up a development environment in Linux/macOS in order to do any of this work and test anything, and I don't currently have that set up.

Perhaps some day when I have a lot of time to devote to a real meaty task I can begin tackling this but just to be realistic I'm not sure I'll have the bandwidth for it any time soon. Though I am very open to the idea of others contributing to the project to work on this task if they would like. Someone reached out to me on Discord recently about potentially taking on this work but they may not have the time for it. I'm always happy to talk through these issues though and offer my opinions on how to approach the problem.

rehtlaw commented 1 month ago

when do you think you can start tackling this? are there still features you want implemented before you want to take a look into cross-platform support?

PerryAsleep commented 1 month ago

I intend to start looking at this soon but I have no estimate for when it might land. There are going to be a lot of unknowns for me to tackle as I am not familiar with Linux development. I don't have an idea of what kinds of blockers I might run into. When I look at this it will likely be for Linux only as I don't have a Mac.

PerryAsleep commented 3 days ago

Linux (x64) and Mac OS (x64 and arm64) support has been added as of this PR into main. There may be a few minor tweaks and cleanups before the release goes out but the bulk of this is complete so I am going to close this request. Linux and Mac versions will be available in the next release, which I hope to make sometime soon.

PerryAsleep / GrooveAuthor

[FEATURE REQUEST] Cross-platform support #10