I'm looking to begin work on a very small-scale, old-school, turn-based strategy game that uses bitmaps for graphics. I'd like to develop the game from the outset using the right tools/environment to simply porting to and from OS X and Windows XP. I'd also like to make sure that the game works upon release on the new Intel-based Macs.

Given all that, does anyone have any suggested development environments or tools that woul help me start on the right foot? I've heard some good things about Codewarrior as a cross-platform IDE, but any input would be welcome.

Also...would it be easier to start on Mac and port to Windows, or vice versa?

Thanks -

As a trick of trade you should separate you game specific code from your system specific code (ie window setup, event handling, etc..).

You can use SDL if you wanna be 100% crossplatform. Otherwise use Cocoa for window setup and event handling and C or C++ for your game.

Now, as far as an environment goes. The best environment and a true crossplatform environment would be using gcc via the command line. However, if you prefer an IDE, it doesn't really matter. As long as your game code is portable enough.

For instance, you can have your Mac version as an Xcode project and your Windows version as Visual Studio project. Both projects should share the same code, ie the game's logic and stuff. System stuff like setting up windows, events, perhaps even setting up OpenGL should be system specific.

On which system you should start is entirely up to you? Do you know how to make apps on a Mac better than on a PC? Then go for Mac, etc.

Hope this helped!

As far as I'm aware, CodeWarrior is effectively dead on OS X, as it won't ever support Universal Binaries, so you're left with a choice of Xcode for the 'traditional' languages (C, C++, etc.) on OS X and any one of a hundred compilers on Windows, or a language/IDE combined development tool like BlitzMax or Processing; if you go the Xcode/'traditional' language route, I'd recommend that you use the SDL library and it's supporting libraries (SDL_image, SDL_mixer) for graphics, sound, and events, as they're cross-platform for all of OS X PowerPC, OS X Intel, and Windows, and have a decent mailing list

Oh, and I were you, I'd begin development on whichever OS you are most familiar with

If speed is not the ultimate concern, REALbasic makes this reasonably easy.

arutau Wrote:I'm looking to begin work on a very small-scale, old-school, turn-based strategy game that uses bitmaps for graphics. I'd like to develop the game from the outset using the right tools/environment to simply porting to and from OS X and Windows XP. I'd also like to make sure that the game works upon release on the new Intel-based Macs.

Given all that, does anyone have any suggested development environments or tools that woul help me start on the right foot? I've heard some good things about Codewarrior as a cross-platform IDE, but any input would be welcome.

Also...would it be easier to start on Mac and port to Windows, or vice versa?

Thanks -

Java gets a bad rap from ancient history, but it's very popular for making tile/sprite based cell-phone games, it has the APIs, and it's faster than you'd think if you just avoid a couple gotchas.

[>] Brian

Hi All -

Many thanks for the great feedback and advice -- all very much appreciated!

Speaking of BlitzMax, does anyone have experience with using that? I'd like to make a very modest game that is tiled-based and uses an isometric viewpoint (i.e., like the viewpoint used in SimCity, Final Fantasy Tactics, X-COM, etc.), and would hope that BlitzMax may do the trick.

Thanks again for the info -

Runtime Revolution! http://www.runrev.com

The programming language is plain english, so it helps you get basic programming concepts down without figuring out the sometimes-confusing syntax of C, Java, etc.

I would *strongly* recommend using it or RealBasic (or maybe BlitzMax, I don't know how easy that is but probably fairly straightforward) before trying to tackle C/C++/Java. That is, if you have had little programming experience up until now.

Blitz is great (and 2/3 the cost of the Pro version of RB). If you throw in their GUI mod, you're looking at about $100 for Blitz. Its a *lot* more work to set up a UI in Blitz than RB though.

Also, Blitz requires you to compile on the target platform (so you can't compile the Mac version on your Windows box, for example.)

To further confuse you, Blitz (in my experience) makes much faster games than RB.

Best cross-platform environment?

Call me old-school, but I love
Emacs, Gcc, and make. Works great on linux, mac, and windows.

;-)

As for cross-platform languages and libraries - I heartily recommend c++ and OpenGL, SDL, and Lua.