Online Gaming Applications Suite
Business Situation
An online gaming client (World’s Leading Listed Online Gaming Company), best known for its online Poker rooms, sought to increase their online players/users through an available Mac OSX platform user base. The idea was simple – migrate Windows gaming client applications to Mac OSX platform. The promise was enormous – multi-million dollar revenue opportunity for the client. The firm had a serious target to release the Mac versions – before World Series of Poker; all related advertisement campaigns were to ride on the event’s popularity. Evidently, substantial budget and foolproof planning were required for definite and quick results. Client was wondering which offshore company to trust.
The Mindfire Solution
With many man-years of Apple software development & migration/porting experience put to test, Mindfire delivered a comprehensive virtual team setup, putting more than 25 experienced resources on the job to work with the client firm’s execution team consisting of Project Coordinators and the acceptance QA team. All development tasks were timely realized, meeting stringent quality requirements.
Mindfire Solution Details
With the introduction of Intel-based Mac machines, there was no real alternative to the PowerPlant class library. The native SDKs, Carbon & Cocoa, looked bare bone compared with the MFC codebase on Windows side. After some research and multiple rounds of evaluation, the migration strategy embraced the WxWidgets library. WxMac, designed to port MFC projects, had been refined over the years. For such a UI-intensive application that had less pure-C/C++ code, porting finally became a viable and economical option. Our porting approach required less work/efforts, also making the Mac codebase much easier to maintain. Besides the initial decisions, the project posed a number of other technical challenges:
-
Server controlled dynamic UI that manifested with game-type and account preferences
-
Frequent screen updates and animation
-
High network traffic, over 200 game messages per second
-
Server messages, user actions and UI updates were critical to game rules
-
Solution(s) for features used on Windows, not feasible on Mac
Achievements
Meeting tough deadlines, Mindfire successfully delivered the project. The release candidate was rigorously tested, made to put through two comprehensive test pass rounds; the test pass consisting of 8000+ test cases. With the benchmark being the Windows version, which had seen a good long, stable run for many years, the Mindfire team could establish the same quality and performance on Mac OSX platform. Client achieved 5% increase in new player numbers on server.
