I don't believe that there are any *general* reasons not to write an IF
game requiring more sophisticated hardware, no matter what baseline you
choose. This depends on the author's aims.
If you want to reach a large target audience, you shouldn't write
anything that requires an SGI to run - but if you don't care who sees it,
go ahead and write it for whatever machine you want! If you write it for
SGIs only, I'll never play it - but then, if you write it for Macs only, or
CBM 64's only, I won't get to play it either. *Any* limitation is
justified, so long as you are prepared to deal with the consequences.
I may want to play your game, but you probably don't even know me - I have
no right to force you into doing what you don't want to do. Personally,
doing conversions was one of the aspects of games programming that really
used to wear me down - if I write a game for DOS and somebody insists I
convert it to Windows (or Unix, or ...) I'll probably tell them where to
get off!
It may not be "nice" or "fair" that player X can't play your game - but
it's not your fault, and it's not your responsibility. "Morals" don't
enter in to it. For my last few months as a professional games programmer
I was developing a game on a 33MHz 386, at a time when most of the
potential market had 486s, so I couldn't even play my *own* game at a
decent speed. You can't always cater for people in this sort of
situation. As they say, "Society's to blame!"
So much for my take on IF authorship in general. I've never written any
*real* IF, but I'm going to get some vapourware lined up for the pipeline
Real Soon Now...so here's my personal position:
I intend to use Inform. Being realistic, I don't suppose I'll ever write
anything as large as a Curses or Legend, or need more than a few "dirty
tricks", so this means just about everyone should be able to run it on
some machine. This is only a bonus - but it doesn't involve any extra
work for me, so why not? I *am* vain enough to want my work to be seen,
but it's not my primary goal.
I intend to take my time over it. I'll try not to announce anything too
soon, but if I do and people are waiting, that's tough. On the other foot,
I do care about whether or not people enjoy it - if I ever get as far as a
second work, feedback *will* affect what I do.
Enough for now.
-- John