NullCascade wrote: ↑15 Jun 2018, 20:48
Nothing should stop that from happening. In plenty of cases, that's desirable behavior. For example, someone might want to incorporate 3D Touch on iOS into the UI, with that dehardcoded. OpenMW very likely won't expose that os-specific feature, but a plugin can.
Other OSs can never have a similar feature? Android? A tablet or touch-screen-capable laptop running a desktop OS? It's never desirable to explicitly lock a feature to a particular OS, since there's nothing to say whether another OS will ever support something similar.
Attempting to force support for every platform isn't what you want.
Neither is assuming only a single platform can ever support something.
But in the modding community it's far more likely that you'll see a situation where the plugin author uses something like Windows, and just don't have the environment set up to ship macOS or Linux libraries. I'm sure they'd be able to collaborate with others on those systems to get it built.
I think you're over-estimating the amount of collaboration that modders would do. We'd see some, sure, but at least as a Linux user, I've well seen the amount of times people have offered to help support Linux for some Windows thing and getting a cold shoulder (if not being explicitly told no because they don't want to deal with Linux users complaining about someone else's port).
Not to mention, this isn't about just the OS, but the architecture too. Does the CPU support SSE4? AVX? AVX-2? Nothing says Linux is on an x86-based CPU, either. There are rumors floating around that macOS may be switching to ARM. You expecting all possible configurations someone may use to get someone to port such mods?
And with native code, who's to say what implementation details they may rely on. Can they hook OpenGL or some other external library OpenMW uses? Or even some internal component of OpenMW itself?