Howdy!
When announcing the v1.2 patch earlier, I already felt that SONAR should run on more platforms than Windows only. After looking at some engines and possibilities to port the game I finally got into Unity3D.
I am new to that engine but I thought
a) I could reuse lots of code, because Unity works with C# just like XNA
b) Unity is one of the most worked with engines out there
c) I have a job now which has to do with game development and it is inevitable that I will stumble over Unity there, anyway
Porting SONAR to this new engine is not an easy task. I wrote my own engine on top of XNA following different design philosphies and producing lots of spaghetti-code, so there is still much work to do until SONAR will be fully ported.
The goal is to publish SONAR on at least Mac and Linux using Unitiy 4 when it's released. The old Windows version will be published along that new Unity-powered version which will probably be called SONAR+ and will contain a few new features like additional levels.
Here is a screenshot of the basic work I've done so far:
I hope to get this finished until the end of the year and will post a news article here and there, so stay tuned ;)
Haha very cool. Why not just use MonoGame instead for cross platform compilation?
MonoGame does not support many of the XNA features used by SONAR, so some workarounds would be necessary. Also see reasons b and c ;)
Yay for the GNU/Linux version!!! :-)
Congratulations on the switch :)