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."

Re:90% shared code? so what?

[Karlt1]

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.

Re:90% shared code?

[Anonymous Coward]

C# and XNA. Not C++.

Re:Meanwhile...

[tepples]

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.

Re:Cross platform - maybe not so awesome

[mobby_6kl]

Rifles in the real world are more accurate than they are made to be in the games. For instance, IRL it's possible to hit a person-sized target at 300 meters with a simple M-16, while in a game, you'd be happy to do that at 100m, and might even need some optics to pull that off. So yeah, it's already hard to hit a moving target a at a long distance, there's no need to also have to fight an inferior input device while doing this.

Also, in any "realistic" game like Rainbow Six or SWAT two people bumping into each other at close range will almost instantly result in at least one corpse, not a prolonged gunfight. I'm sorry if that's not something your console allows you to experience, it's great fun and leads to very tense and exciting matches :D

Re:Meanwhile...

[drsmithy]

Windows XP/7, Windows Mobile, and Xbox are not all running Windows. They are all entirely independent code-bases that were developed separately.

This is not correct. The XBox [360] OS is a Windows NT fork (from Windows 2000, IIRC, or maybe XP).