I'd be interested to hear the experiences of people who have developed apps/games for multiple platforms - particularly Win/Mac/Linux. Certain technologies (I'm thinking especially of Blitzmax - I own B3D not Max - and Java) are marketed as though you simply write the code and then it will compile for whichever platform you desire. So is this true? Or do you always have endless debugging, tweaking, rewriting to do?
Multiple Platforms
Miscellaneous Forums/General Discussion/Multiple Platforms So far, my projects have required minimal tweaks. I do all of my development on my Mac, and then compile a version on XP. I haven't tried compiling on Linux.
The tweaks usually involve file opening/reading, since your path to the files is going to look a little different on each platform.
Other places you could get caught up are if you use a lot of compiler directives (like "?Win32"), since the code will be different depending on what you put in there, and if you use any platform-specific stuff (DirectX-specific commands, direct calls to the Windows API, etc). Obviously, if it's a Windows API call, it's not going to work on your other platforms (and vice versa).
The tweaks usually involve file opening/reading, since your path to the files is going to look a little different on each platform.
Other places you could get caught up are if you use a lot of compiler directives (like "?Win32"), since the code will be different depending on what you put in there, and if you use any platform-specific stuff (DirectX-specific commands, direct calls to the Windows API, etc). Obviously, if it's a Windows API call, it's not going to work on your other platforms (and vice versa).
As far as GUI-apps is concerned with BlitzMax, you are going to have issues with MaxGUI, since it doesn't always perform in the same way on all platforms - this is where you get to tweak/debug etc.
Not that it can't be done, it's just more work than it should be - and certainly don't count on getting much done on Linux with Max's default FLTK GUI.
But there are alternatives (like a GTK MaxGUI on Linux), so things are improving all the time in the Apps arena.
The Mac MaxGUI has also improved of late, and is pretty solid now.
Not that it can't be done, it's just more work than it should be - and certainly don't count on getting much done on Linux with Max's default FLTK GUI.
But there are alternatives (like a GTK MaxGUI on Linux), so things are improving all the time in the Apps arena.
The Mac MaxGUI has also improved of late, and is pretty solid now.