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Comments: 196 + - Developers: Microsoft Demos Three Platforms Running the Same Game on Sunday March 07, @12:24PM
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."
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Not Cross Platform (Score:5, Insightful)
We expect them to be pushing studd across their own platforms. Not news.
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Yep, you beat me to it. I was going to comment... how is this cross-platform? It's all Windows technologies and .NET. That's hardly cross-platform. Show it to me on Windows, Linux, Mac, Wii, Xbox and PS3 and that'll be something to post an article about.
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Remember, one of the definitions of cross platform is that it still works after a system restart.
Re:Not Cross Platform (Score:5, Interesting)
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The device is part of the platform, so it is cross platform, just weakly so. OTOH, I have no idea why you think what you describe would be 'newsworthy.' I can run a GUI app with OpenGL written in python on my Mac, Windows, and Linux
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By your definition of platform, sure.
Unfortunately, you have a strict, non-standard interpretation of 'platform' that doesn't fall in line with pretty much the entire rest of the world.
MS, and most of the world has come to believe cross platform means hardware platform OR software platform. FreeBSD 7 is one platform, FBSD 8 is another.
You're definition doesn't match with the majority of the rest of the business world. Its kind of hard for you to communicate effectively with them if you don't understand wh
Cross-platform? (Score:2)
Great! Can't wait til they have this at the BlackBerry app store.
Oh, you didn't really mean what we normally mean by "cross-platform" then?
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Re:Cross-platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
and lets you resume from that spot on whichever platform you happen to pick
My take was a little different. "oh, so they finally got it to work the way it's expected to work? Congrats.
1) use the same save game format
2) use the same controller layout
3) be network gaming compatible
is this soooo much to ask?
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Meanwhile... (Score:4, Insightful)
A simple demo game written on a Fedora system runs perfectly on Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva, Mint, Arch, and a few dozen others, but nobody paid for a press conference.
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Re:Meanwhile... (Score:4, 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.
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Re:Meanwhile... (Score:4, Funny)
And the 0.02% of the global video game playing market rejoiced!
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Re:Meanwhile... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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).
So now pc games will be dumbed down to phone level (Score:3, Insightful)
So now pc games will be Dumbing down to the phone level.
And If you think that deus ex 2 was bad with that then this may even worse.
And will this lock out user maps and mods.
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Its already started - Supreme Commander 2, which I hoped would be a perfect extension of SupCom1.. turns out to be dumbed down game designed specially for the XBox. I've heard comments from people that they won't even bother pirating it, let alone buying it.
This is the new world order - dumbed down for the phone is next.
Cross platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, my god, he's displaying this and he has all these #ifdefs and "copies of projects" within his workspace and a "shared resources" folder for the game. Is that the future of cross platform? That's more like the PAST of cross platform. The way to do this is to create interfaces for the same object and implement that using different devices. What you don't want, ever, is to have all this different execution paths through your code using #ifdefs to instruct the compiler to compile each and every one of them separately.
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Re:Cross platform? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, i do not get it. What is so special about this? Looks primitive to me, and you still do not have a cross platform solution yet. I can make that game even easier and truly cross platform....HTML, Javascript and CSS. Sure there needs to be some hacks to support broken browsers like IE, and yeah it will run in a slow browser like IE, but it the same code runs on Windows, OSX, GNU Linux, Iphone OS (touch, ipad, iphone), Blackberry, Windows BMW 7 Series (sorry could not resist), Solaris, Palm Web OS, etc...
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Re:Cross platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess you've never actually used XNA, but feel qualified to talk about it regardless.
The reason you have ifdefs in XNA projects are not because you need to ifdef everything from the graphics API to the networking API and so on. The ifdefs exist, because the different platforms it works across have different capabilities. You do not have an XBox 360 controller on Windows 7 phones, and you do not have a touch screen or keyboard on the XBox 360, the fact is the platforms DO have differences and they simply have to be catered to one way or another, the method used really works just fine and has no disadvantages- go and actually have a play with XNA rather than just whining about it.
The doesn't detract from the fact though, that all your rendering, networking, audio, concurrency, IO, physics, game code and so forth are shared between them.
A lot of people are talking it down as been there done that, but has it really? Well no, it hasn't. The great thing about Xbox live is the profile system and how everything connects back to it- they're just taking that across other platforms, you should be able to buy a game on XBox live arcade and play it wherever you are and that's the goal, simply put this hasn't really been done yet. The closest we've had are flash games and other web based games, but they're limited in performance, and are limited in ability. Even the likes of Steam hasn't stepped away from Windows yet, and only just seems to be creeping across to the Mac, there's no sign of it going to Linux, or phones, or media players, or consoles any time soon, if ever. This is a big deal, because it means you can continue to play your games wherever you are, and it makes it piss easy for developers to do it, you no longer need graphics abstraction layers and so forth like you used to.
Really, if this is not cross platform, and if this is the way of doing things in the past then tell me, where can I find a phone, console, and computer that let me play the same game and move between them without having to manually copy saves, without having to buy a different copy of the game for each platform, without having to care about anything technical, and which makes full use of graphics hardware and isn't some crippled web implementation of something.
What's that you murmured? no such thing currently exists. So this IS in fact a major step forward? thought so.
I love how Slashdot goes idiotic about things when Microsoft is involved, but if this was Apple they'd be masturbating all over the screen because Apple has created something else that "just works" even though when it's Apple it's inherently crippled, and uses a dated horrible language like Objective C.
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Platform = HARDWARE platform (Score:2)
For those nerds equally confused, I'm pretty confident that they just mean the hardware platform, since all devices seem to be using some kind of Windows & .NET. So the software platform is more or less the same. It just shows how you can store and load save games from the .NET using different hardware platforms.
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Even so, how is it news? I could understand if Apple were to show OS X running well on non-Apple hardware, and implying that it may be legally allowed in the future. That's news. Windows and Windows programs have been running on myriad hardware combinations for years, with few problems (if we ignore Vista). This is not news.
Just make it happen for Civilization 5 (Score:4, Funny)
Make it happen for Civ 5, so I can play the same game on the TV at home, switch to the laptop when the wife wants to watch TV, then switch to the phone in the bathroom at work! My life would be complete.
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Takeing civ 4 as guide no phone will have power ru (Score:2)
Takeing civ 4 as guide no phone will have the power run it at any good speed also the small screen will make it hard to play.
They've got their head in the sand (Score:3, Interesting)
I can see where this is news for Microsoft, king of platform-specific APIs. For those of us accustomed to developing using, say, SDL and OpenGL, this isn't news at all, as a properly written program using said libraries will need literally zero changes between several platforms. The input bit is tricky, but 90% reuse is low, I would think.
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Re:They've got their head in the sand (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to ignore the mostly inflammatory content of your post, because there is a valid point in there -- that the complexity of a lot of operations are underestimated by those unfamiliar when they are heavily exposed to the end product. On that count, I agree.
However, in this instance, at least, the concern is misplaced. I do have experience with cross-platform development, including any game-related subsystem you care to name (video, audio, mouse/kb/controller input, networking, file/data access, et cetera). The problem IS a trivial one if it is planned and accounted for, rather than a last-minute decision.
For 99% of development studios, it goes something like this: use DirectX, porting is a nightmare. Use SDL/OpenGL, porting is changing less than 5% of your code (and for non-'exotic' applications, 0%). Some things are -designed- to allow portability; it should be no surprise that they enable it. This is quite simply a field that UNIX-alikes have been dealing with for a long time, and Windows applications have not.
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Virtual Machine? (Score:2, Insightful)
cross-platform != monoculture (Score:2)
Only 90% of the code in common? (Score:5, Interesting)
God almighty, their code base is more fragmented than I ever imagined.
Even at the worst of the "UNIX wars", if you had to rewrite as much as 10% of your code to get it to run on (say) AIX, SunOS, and System V that meant you'd done a really bad job of isolating the platform-specific parts of your code. If Microsoft can't keep their code bases in sync when they control all of them and they have incentive to do so, they're really slipping.
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Only player 1 (Score:2)
I agree, There is nothing special about running with or without a game controller.
Other than that it's the only choice for players 2, 3, and 4. Only player 1 can use a keyboard and mouse.
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Actions script is a dynamic interpreted, and it significantly limits its performance. Writing cross platform c++ code is significantly harder.* (Although, if you use a compilers by the same vendor it makes things easier.)
I guess this demo was about to showcase their cross-platform gaming libraries. I guess 10% non-shared parts were responsible for the different user-interface controls.
* I guess it's more likely some c++ libraries with .net bindings.
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Nothing is going to be native C++ on Windows anymore. Microsoft is only interested in using .NET, probably C#, for *everything*.
Its their new lock-in. Developers write in C# and find their code only works on Microsoft platforms. Then they look at their developer tools and features MS has packed in there and think "I don't know/not interested in writing code that works on alternative platforms", as Ballmer grins and rubs his hands together.
I know the 'real' game studios all use C++, so I understand where you
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Have you ever played a Flash game with a joystick or a gamepad? On any machine without a keyboard or mouse? How about a Flash game that makes use of 3D hardware?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
dom
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Flash is the platform. It's not a particularly efficient one on Windows, let alone any of the places where an inferior knockoff is provided. You can get halfway decent performance on OSX (from what I hear) and you get almost that good of an experience with Linux on x86_64... Or in other words, ugh.
Re:90% shared code? so what? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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If you are writing different libraries for each platform -- that's not 100% code re-use
sure it is. if you use libc - is that code re-use? i have done a library for a generic platform for developing on top of. it is a library; that as a developer you dont have to write - you just use it.. just like openGL, libc, mathlib et al
You're not "just distributing" the same binary for each platform.
unless there is a universal "thick binary" standard; you are going to have to ship different binaries. thats how it is.
W
No text-to-speech in XNA (Score:2)
as for audio; worst case; you have PCM audio.
That's not the worst case. The worst case is XNA's solution "XACT", where you have to precompile all audio assets into your solution. You can't synthesize audio at runtime, which means no chance of text-to-speech.
i avoid .NET and Java like the plague for mobile applications
Then how do you target BlackBerry and Android, both of which use Java? Or how do you justify to your boss the lost sales from not targeting these platforms?
The second paddle (Score:2)
I most certainly have the source to a pong clone [for OpenGL and GLUT] that will compile on OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows out of the box. Not even an ifdef.
What controls are used for the second paddle in this Pong clone? If a gamepad, then since when does GLUT support gamepads? If another computer, then since when does the same networking code work without modification (not even WSAStartup()) on Windows?
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If you have platform specific bits, you merely have very high code reuse, not 100% code reuse.
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90% shared code? so what? (Score:-1, Troll)
is it me - or are some of the slashdot moderators total idiots? either apple or microsoft fan boys. when i was your age you were probably still in diapers. obviously they miss the point. oh well.
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They have low res and high res versions of the content as can be seen in the Visual Studio solution in the video. The phone will use the low res content only.
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In games where precise control offers an advantage, say a shooter, a player with a mouse may have an advantage overs someone with a controller. Can the game be designed to level the playing field by introducing automatic assistance in aiming , yes, but that limits a players ability to prevail with better skills
Rifles in the real world are much less accurate than a mouse. I'm a little tired of hyper accurate mouse targeting "skills" being the centerpiece of shooter mechanics. How about some more strategy? Console games have been branching out with soldiers, planes, trucks and tanks, all of which adapt well to gamepads. Even games with 100% auto-aim can work, look at Warhawk. How can you even say "skill" when everyone has different machines running at different frame rates with different mice, and differing ne
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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 ea
Re:Cross platform - maybe not so awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
There are a good number of people I know (including a few riflemen in the Marine Corps) who would most definitely disagree with your first statement. It's more of a matter of the ability of the shooter, not the accuracy of the rifle. The US Military has some highly accurate rifles, when put in the hands of the right shooter.
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Re:"Cross Platform" (Score:5, Insightful)
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So..., does this mean they'll sell me the same game x times?
Only if you choose to buy it x times.
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