Hi Davy, A question and a comment;
When you say big bucks for a developer account, you are aware that this is $99 per year, not per month, yes? This translates to less than $8 per month, -less than $2 per week. Not sure of your budget but just want to make sure we're all on the same page here. :) To your point about not needing XCode when using C++, you do still need XCode to build for iOS / Mac, regardless of whether you use C++ or not. Hope this helps and hope you and yours are having a most lovely holiday season! Smiles, Cara :) --- iOS design and development - LookTel.com --- View my Online Portfolio at: http://www.onemodelplace.com/CaraQuinn Follow me on Twitter! https://twitter.com/ModelCara On Dec 13, 2013, at 8:30 AM, Davy Kager <[email protected]> wrote: Hi, All very interesting points you made. I tend to agree that C++ is awesome (in an IDE that isn't vendor-specific, with an opensource toolchain). I'd love to automate my build process on Linux and do nightlies for beta testers. My main reason for using Java is that I can't avoid using it in the future, on projects where I don't get to decide what language to use. I am interested in iOS development in the long run. I thought of concentrating on Windows for now, using OpenAL or XAudio2 with C++, and then combining a Mac and iOS project since both use Objective-C and OpenAL. The most prominent reason for not doing that is that I'm not comfortable buying a MacBook and spending big money on a developer account just yet, and XCode is really the way to go for Objective-C. Doing something in C++ would mostly remove the requirement for XCode, which is a good thing to me as I'd like to unify the development process as much as possible. Still, right now I'm leaning towards using Java since I already have a skeleton engine set up in that language and because it's so easy to debug code on the JVM. My only problem is with the ease of decompiling. There are solutions, most notably ahead-of-time compiling, but then you lose not only some advantages of the JVM, but also a huge heap of money. :) But then, I also remember how Thomas struggled to find the right language for MOTA and lost valuable time (I'm told there's still no final version 1 for that game?). Clearly you need to bite that bullet some day or be obscured in the fog of indecisiveness. Cheers, Davy -----Original Message----- From: Gamers [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Draconis Sent: Friday, December 13, 2013 17:06 To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] BGT, Mac and More Chiming in on these cross-platform topics seems to be a common theme for me. LOL I have three points I’d like to make. First, ignoring Mac as a viable platform for blind gamers is a poor strategy. One year on, and Mac sales are still far exceeding Windows sales, even in comparison to back in the hay day of audio games, some 10 years ago or so. It isn’t just about raw user numbers, it is about demographics and the quality of those users. Which leads me to my second point. There is an old saying: “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.” This could not apply to anything as well as it does to the statement that Android is more popular than iOS overall. It is technically true that Android is used in more devices, but that is because many of those devices are not, strictly speaking, Android devices. That is to say, they are not being used as portable computing devices like iOS devices are. Kindles, Nooks, many models of feature phones, and countless other gadgets, all get lumped into the Android user numbers, even though many of those devices are so limited in scope that users don’t even know Android was used in their development. This is why, in the areas that matters, iOS’s numbers are so much better than Android’s, despite the marketshare numbers that the media likes to quote. iOS consistently has over 80% of web usage from mobile devices, for example. iOS users are for more likely to pay for apps, too. iOS users also spend more time on their devices, showing greater engagement with the platform. And those kinds of numbers go on and on. It is the same kind of trick as companies like Samsung use that create headlines in the news like: “Samsung sells 10 million Galaxy blah blah”. In reality, they shipped that number to resellers and warehouses. Shipped, but not necessarily sold to end users. Samsung never actually releases specific sales numbers. They only ever announce numbers of units shipped. It sounds better that way. Apple, conversely, only ever announces sales to end users, and never the number of units shipped. All of this, before you even start taking into account the fragmentation of Android, which is a disaster that Google is continuing to scramble to get a hold on with nothing to show for it. Less than 2% of Android devices are running the latest version of the OS, compared with over 70% of iOS devices. Android is a support nightmare for developers, much as Windows is. Granted, that 2% number may be slightly skewed, given Google’s continued desire to artificially inflate the usage numbers of Android, but it is still a huge problem for the platform. My final point is a technical one. We explored a number of options for developing the Draconis Engine, including experimenting with various languages, techniques, and technologies. We have now shipped multiple titles on three platforms in the space of eleven months. Three Mac releases, three Windows releases, and one iOS release. (This assumes you count the Show Cases for Mac/Windows.) The Draconis Engine was created with C++ primarily, with very tiny portions written in Objective-C to cover OS X and iOS GUI, and small portions in C# for Windows. While C++, like any language, has advantages and disadvantages, if you are interested in cross-platform development, particularly game development, we found that the relatively minor trade offs were worth the huge advantages we gained by going this route. Just about all other cross-platform methods, like Java or Python, come with huge disadvantages, as I believe Tom has mostly already covered. Hope this is helpful. --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected]. --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected]. --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
