Itouch SDK on Windows?

If you somehow manage to install Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6 on your PC (you could use a Virtual PC software... There are some good free out there... So you only need the Mac OS X ), you won't need a Mac. Otherwise you can only build Web-Apps, so no "real" Apps one downloads from the AppStore...

 

I think there's someone here who's done it on Windows (Flickitty?) dunno how though, I have a Mac

 

Oh really? Sounds interesting (I just bought a mac for this ;-) )

 

You were lucky! I just turned on my phone that moment

 

Flickitty didn't use the iPhone SDK apple provided, he used some other language, which is why it was possible.

 

*cough* use search *cough*

haha j/k http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=35374

 

what do you mean he used some other language rather than the sdk

 

He used Lua or something to code Flickitty.

 

Flickitty is really difficult to explain. The vast majority of the game is coded in Lua (scripting language). Lua is extremely easy to work with, it is lightning fast (look at the framerate in Flickitty) and the footprint is extremely small.

Essentially it is the perfect language for mobile devices.

Lua is also used in hundreds of desktop games, including World of Warcraft.

Now of course a scripting language is useless without an interpreter. So I have a custom-built engine for that. I guess you could say it is like building a game in Flash, except execution is much faster.

There are other (iPhone) engines that use Lua, with best option being sio2, except it is mainly 3D. Corona also uses Lua, but it is a complete turd and basically used for Apps (not games).

So my custom engine is about 99% C/C++, which makes it run on Windows. I used the Windows build to build Flickitty. However, we still needed a Mac to build the Distribution and Release builds. So somewhere down the line, you DO need a Mac.

In our case, we need it for about 30 minutes to compile the necessary builds.

Since the engine is mainly C/C++ that makes it easy to port to nearly any platform. We can currently run it on Windows, MacOs, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Linux with very little modification.

That is way more info than anyone actually needed.

 

Impressive... so you basically used the language which is used to build small interface customizations in World of Warcraft?

I knew I would regret not learning this language someday

 

I guess i need money

Thanx everyone for at least shedding some info including You Flickitty

But Alas i still need a mac

i would love to develop apps on windows though......

I guess selling my xbox 360 will get me the money! Hahahhaha

 

It was mentioned *cough* earlier that this sort of thread has *cough* been around ... but I'll add additional info ... which has already been discussed.

There are a few devs out there that are doing development on a PC. We're one of them as well. But you will eventually need a Mac in the pipeline at the end.

Most people doing this will probably be using OpenGL and C++ as their core code base. They would then have a small amount of intermediary code to interface to the iPhone (eg. creating GL contexts). And of course, on the PC, you may possibly be using OpenGL instead of OpenGL ES (our engine supports both).

You can also use OpenAL on the PC as well as the Mac. Even though we actually use AudioQueues, our first audio engine used OpenAL.

Note that Obj-C will allow you to mix in C++ if you want. You just need to make sure in xCode to tag the files as sourcecode.cpp.objcpp. You only need this for files that mix the two.

At the end of the day, you will need to cross compile for your target, which is the iPhone to get in on the device for both testing and distribution.

We only use the Mac for difficult debug situations that occur on the device, testing, and doing distribution and release builds. However, if we had to, we could go all Mac, because everything, include our tool chain has been ported to the Mac.

So whether or not you use a PC or not I think largely depends on preference. My guess is most devs working on the PC now have probably already built for the PC, so they know the Visual Studio and other tools on the PC well.

 

haha no problem, it was just funny because it was still on the first page of posts, you didn't even need to use search