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Microsoft Demos Three Platforms Running the Same Game
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."
Ok, if it doesn't run on any non-Microsoft platform, it's not cross platform. Nice try Microsoft. Better luck next time.
Depending on what you're doing, most if not all can be accomplished with OpenGL and GLUT.
I most certainly have the source to a pong clone that will compile on OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows out of the box. Not even an ifdef.
Of course, EVERYONE uses 'frameworks' unless they are writing raw assembly and not using any linker libraries.
From my standpoint, there is no platform specific code, unless you count the command line required to start the build (its simple, single source file, didn't even bother with a makefile)
Screen resolutions are irrelevant to me, it just scales, if you were to put it on an iPhone, you'd need good vision, but thats easy enough to remedy without special treatment for the iPhone if you choose to give up things on desktop PCs.
Graphics hardware and input differences are taken into account by using OpenGL and GLUT. Note, these are native on OSX, OpenGL is native in windows, GLUT not so much, of course neither are native in FBSD or Linux, but again, everyone uses frameworks of some sort. So MS calls them Frameworks and I call them shared library, while technically different they are for practical purposes the same thing.
Most certainly wrong, you are not able to do so. You may move the binary and run it, but it most certainly IS being recompiled. Thats part of what the Common Language Runtime does, unfortunately you're confusing MS marketing with reality, this leads me to believe you know even less about development than you realize. I could actually do the exact same thing as you are doing with C# source code and a wrapper to kickstart the process. It'd have to be a .NET wrapper since getting a batch file to run on WinMo isn't something you can do out of the box.
From my perspective, I've dealt with #1, 3, 4 and 5. I can do #2 with a java wrapper probably if I thought it mattered, but it really doesn't, its just not that big of a deal right now. It'd be nice to move across platforms without anything special, but currently it would be retarded. Games (and 'business apps' typically have different resource requirements for diffferent platforms like this. Its retarded to include 3 gigs of ultrahigh resolution textures, lightmaps and models when publishing to a mobile device. When one texture has about 12 times the resolution of the screen, its rather pointless. You're going to distribute multiple packages anyway so your PC users can have their 3 gigs of high res textures and you're going to distribute one for your WinMo users that have 5 megs of textures and models that are more than high enough resolution for display on your 320x240 postage stamp screen. Effectively making the quest for #2 fucking retarded.
My point is that really, none of this shit matters to anyone serious.
This shit from Microsoft is entirely to get crappy incapable programmers using MS dev tools to produce more things that businesses are tied into using MS platforms for. We can sit around and debate it, but the only people who think this is different are those that don't understand development in general, and those are EXACTLY the people MS wants to hit with this sort of thing.
I'm sorry, what was the point?
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