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Microsoft Demos Three Platforms Running the Same Game

Posted by Soulskill on from the pick-up-and-play dept.

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Engadget: "Microsoft's Eric Rudder, speaking at TechEd Middle East, showed off a game developed in Visual Studio as a singular project (with 90% shared code) that plays on Windows with a keyboard, a Windows Phone 7 Series prototype device with accelerometer and touch controls, and the Xbox 360 with the Xbox gamepad. Interestingly, not only is the development cross-platform friendly, but the game itself (a simple Indiana Jones platformer was demoed) saves its place and lets you resume from that spot on whichever platform you happen to pick up."

2 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Re:90% shared code? so what? by Karlt1 · · Score: 3, Informative

    i've been writing code across many platforms with 100% code reuse - more importantly, not using a runtime - all my applications are native. just write a few basic entry points; put the platform specific points in a library and then all your applications link against this. you then end up with native binaries for each platform - just distribute. this is not news - most developers have been able to do this for years (including myself). i can build applications for windows, linux, macosx, iphone, windows mobile, symbian series 60/uiq, palmos, moblin, maemo et al by doing this and i've been doing it since 2003.

    Let's see where to start....

    1. If you are writing different libraries for each platform -- that's not 100% code re-use
    2. You're not "just distributing" the same binary for each platform.
    3. What are you using for graphics, sounds, storage, etc. on each platform?
    4. You're doing this without a bunch of #ifdef's?
    5. How are you accounting for different screen resolutions, graphics hardware, touch capabilities, and other hardware difference?

    I've never programmed games for either the PC or mobile but I do write boring old business apps for Windows Mobile industrial devices. I'm able to target Windows Mobile and take the same app and run it flawlessly on the desktop -- without a recompile.

  2. Re:Meanwhile... by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    A simple demo game written on a Fedora system runs perfectly on [other Linux operating systems], but nobody paid for a press conference.

    Unless the game was developed using the Allegro library. Distributions that switched to PulseAudio broke sound in Allegro games because PulseAudio does not like unsigned 16-bit PCM.