Let me enter this most holy war with some first hand experience. I have under my belt 5 Android-only games and one cross platform Android/ iPhone game. Want to guess which took the least amount of time relative to difficulty of game to do? The fact of the matter is that once you're good at cross platform programming, you get the advantage of being able to code/build/test natively in Windows or OSX which saves a good minute every time over deploying to the device and is easier overall to do. Why not use the emulator? It takes forever and does not have adequate 3D performance and does not support GLES 2.0. So I code in Eclipse/CDT, test mostly on Win32 builds then do a daily or every other day build for Android using NDK r4 (I haven't switched to 5 yet). What I test for on Android is scale, usability (controls) and performance. Of course if you're heavily multitouched you'll need more device testing time but often times keyboard bindings and a mouse can get you around that somewhat for testing on a desktop OS.
Things are working so well for me that I know for certain I will not be developing any more platform-specific games in Java. I'm experiencing serious time savings and the performance I'm getting is fantastic. Of course there's a couple of months of code to build up to be able to do this (and I will be licensing mine soon for anyone interested who wants to save some time) but once you're over that hump, it's pure productivity. On Jan 24, 11:56 am, Phil Endecott <[email protected]> wrote: > On Jan 22, 7:27 am, Hogus <[email protected]> wrote: > > > People spend way too much time worrying aboutcross-platform > > capability at the outset. > > Companies > > spend so much time trying to roll their product out to everyone that > > they back themselves into corners where there is no way to actually > > provide the functionality that they want to provide and end up with > > some watered down, "me too", application that anyone else could have > > developed. > > This is an interesting viewpoint which I agree with to a certain > extent. > > For me, the main motivation for making my codecross-platformis to > avoid having all my eggs in one basket. (The "Apple Basket" in many > cases.) Diversity, both across platforms and across apps, reduces the > risk of some event beyond my control taking away the income that pays > the rent. > > Perhaps the important thing is to at least be aware of your options, > and to know what technologies arecross-platformand which are not. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
