[gameprogrammer] Re: Fast development over multiple platforms, which language?

From: Bob Pendleton <bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Gameprogrammer Mailing List <gameprogrammer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 13:41:28 -0600

Tough question. 

You have to characterize your target market a little more. There is no
way to write an application and have it be fully portable to all the
different platforms out there. Cell phones are very different from
desktops. 

If your target market is desktop x86 PCs then it *is* possible to build
a CD that just boots, loads its own OS, and lets you run games. Game
knoppix http://games-knoppix.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/ is a version of Debian
Linux that you burn to a CD and boot. It contains a complete Linux OS,
device drivers for just about every kind of sound and video card, and it
loads and configures itself to play games on nearly every PC there is.

You could take game knoppix, strip out the desktop and all the other
nice applications, and have an OS that would boot, configure itself, and
start your game. The disk would have the installer and drivers, the
Linux kernel, X, a sound library, and your game. 

You could develop in any language you want from Python to C++ and have a
complete standalone game disk. Your game would then run on all the x86
machines out there. I would suggest bit-torrent as the way to distribute
the game.

There are other ways to go. But, face it, if you write for anything but
C/C++ targeting the native API of the OS it is to run on you are going
to have to deal with some overhead for the run time systems. The
question is how much do you want to deal with? 

                bob Pendleton

On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 10:12 -0800, Jason Clark wrote:
> I know that OS, language, and platforms can be an almost religious subject to 
> some, but I am interested in hearing some opinions.
>  
> I have a few ideas for small, yet hopefully entertaining games. I am trying 
> to decide what I should write them in however. I am completely agnostic on 
> the subject and always looking for excuses to learn new things, so open to 
> any suggestion.
>  
> What I do know is that the vast majority of users will be on windows, with 
> some on Mac, and very few (who would pay a penny) on *nix OS. That said, 
> using the web as the medium of choice would be easiest for players and the 
> abilities of SVG would be great...  that is if it currently had much support. 
> Java would be great because of its wide distribution (as opposed to Python 
> and many other scripting languages) but even with all the advances in their 
> RTE Java is still very slow and not particularly what I am looking for.
> I love to write C/C++ recreationally, but once you have a compiled language 
> you have to test and build on all kinds of platforms, and with the constant 
> changes to Windows and such, it doesn't seem that you would, without 
> paramount effort, be able to keep the games going.
> I know nothing of Flash, so I can't comment on that.
>  
> I remember way back when you would include an OS (or at least it's 
> fundamentals) in your game, so that you could throw in your disk and just 
> boot on it, not worrying about it. I wonder if that isn't a doable option 
> nowadays, though for what I'm thinking, I doubt the users would want to go 
> through that much effort.
> I can see the use of setting up your own run time environment, or creating a 
> core system you can distribute, but that is like reinventing the wheel, 
> something I'm trying to avoid.
>  
> Does anyone have any success or failure stories for particular languages or 
> build/distribution processes that you'd be willing to share?
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References:
- [gameprogrammer] Fast development over multiple platforms, which language?
  - From: Jason Clark

[gameprogrammer] Re: Fast development over multiple platforms, which language?

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