Develop iPhone games on windows and even submit to the app store. I have nothing to do with this, just letting you all know as it is awesome. http://www.dragonfiresdk.com/index.htm
This seems a good attempt but there are more alternatives as well. We are currently using GLBasic for our 3 upcoming IPhone games, it's more advanced and has 3D support as well. http://www.glbasic.com/
I've been very interested in cross-platform mobile games recently, so I can write a single game and compile it for iPhone, Android, and Windows Mobile without changing the code. I recently discovered the Airplay SDK (http://airplaysdk.com/) which is designed specifically for high-end 3d mobile games. You develop in Windows (and with their next update in February you can develop on Macs too) and then deploy on any device. I've been spending some time in Windows playing around with it recently. You still need a Mac with the iPhone SDK installed to code-sign the binary, but that's the only step you need to use a Mac for.
We were talking about this briefly at the conference on Wednesday, weren't we? Airplay seems to support Lua for scripting, which is PERFECT for me. I think this might be the basic framework I am looking for, and it is multiplatform. I'm downloading the Free version now.
Yeah, the other day I did some more research into cross-platform development and I found it. I've been playing with it a lot and I'm actually getting ready to completely rewrite Skeleton Key (with several improvements) using Airplay SDK so I can release it for Android and Windows Mobile also. I've been looking into it and ready the documentation and scrolling throw sample programs a lot the last 2 days, so I have a much better idea of how it works. You work in Visual C++ (or soon, when the new version is released, in Xcode if you want), and you basically just start with a main() function and go from there. It provides a collection of abstracted libraries for 2d graphics, 3d graphics, audio, touch input, accelerometer, location, and about everything else smartphones can do now. So you need to learn all of those libraries, and write your game with all of those. Then once you compile it for multiple platform, Airplay deals with the intricacies of all of the different platforms for you. So there's no need to learn the iPhone SDK, the Android SDK, or to program for any of the other platforms. You just write your game in straight C++ using their SDK, and it works for everything. So it supports Lua, as well as lots of other open source libraries. And for libraries that it doesn't actually come with (Lua is included), nothing stops you from grabbing the source and compiling it yourself.
Interesting. The license to develop & deploy commercial iPhone apps is free, too. I'll definitely keep an eye on this.
For Rail Adventures I have made a 3D engine that compiles on both Windows and Mac with a single line of code change. It's no big deal really, to write cross platform code.
It's not hard to write code that compiles between Windows, Mac, and Linux because there are so many great cross-platform libraries available, like SDL. But for mobile devices it's a completely different story. iPhone apps are written in Objective-C, Android apps are written in Java, Palm Pre apps are written in Javascript. The way you detect touches is completely different, the different devices have different hardware and screen ratios. Anyway, check out these demos of Airplay SDK apps I've found: This one shows how cross-platform it is:
Micah's point is important though, for those who are looking for a way to develop on the iPhone without having to buy a Mac. You will still need access to one for the final step, signing the provisioning profile.
I was surprised to find out Resident Evil: Degeneration was coded on the Airplay SDK. That's a really good-looking game considering it's not the native SDK.
I haven't built my custom API to avoid buying a Mac. The Mac sits nicely on my desk I just find it easier to work in Windows on games, since I have all my tools at hand.
it still uses the native SDK - it really comes down to how you design; you can do cross-platform development very easily with a good base design. our own internal build dev kit (similar to airplay) allows us to build native applications and maximize on performance. we were one of the first to do it; back in 2003 - but we kept it internal and developed purely out of interest. there are so many more of these types of environments appearing - so, there will be huge competition between all the various companies providing such services.. i'm considering opening up my own SDK for end-users; but i need to find something unique from what others provide - and, i have a few excellent ideas. you can use linux, windows or mac osx. iphone/windows mobile/symbian/maemo et al are just export platforms really. nothing beats the tools for debugging that desktop platforms provide.
