I''ve been thinking. As an indie developer, every sale has to count. You want to hit as large a target audience as possible. Is it worth the effort to develop a game for more than one platform? My thought was that if you''re getting less than a hundred downloads a month, two or three mac or linux downloads might actually be worthwhile. The caveat would be if you could design with cross-platform in mind from the very beginning. It definately wouldn''t be viable if you had to do a big effort porting. Or is a better strategy just to target one platform and take advantage of everything you can on that platform? This is really just a cost question: I don''t really care about open source or toppling the Microsoft hegemony, nor do I think that cross platform code is inherently better. Just maybe more sales. Take care, Bill

All of the code I've written for a long time has run in at least Windows and Linux. A couple things I learned about porting code:

Intend it to be portable from the beginning. Fixing it halfway through is difficult.

Keep your code endian-friendly.

Know your platforms very well. It certainly helps to own and occasionally (if not frequently) use a Mac if you're going to port to Mac. Each platform does things slightly differently; it's best to know about these differences before hand.

Abstract as much as possible. Not only does this help create good programming practices, it makes changes in the lower level code much easier. You should probably be doing this even if you're only writing for a single platform.

Find already written libraries to help you out as much as possible. There are so many of these around; there's almost no excuse to use many of them .
Now, I'm not going to be able to give you a clear answer about where you should write cross platform code. However, if you can put up with the previous things, then there's no reason to write single platform code . They really aren't as bad as they may seem; many of them are just good techniques that many people ignore.


Edited by - Null and Void on March 7, 2002 12:05:03 AM