STEVEN GOODWIN
1 Cross Platform is Necessary to Recover the Costs
With the development costs of a modern graphics intensive game reaching something like $15 million, you can't afford to ignore any sizable market, so if for another million or so you can make your game work on one machine like say a PC, but also on others like an X-Box, a Mac, a ... well you get the picture.
In this book Mr. Goodwin, who has "been there, done that" talks about designing a game from the ground up so that it will perform identically on multiple platforms. By including good design practices from the beginning, the programming team can greatly reduce the effort required to produce the different variations of the game, in many cases using the same code to handle the different machines.
The CD that comes with this book contains far more original material than most. It includes code for a memory manager, filesystem, and network driver developed using the principles shown in the book. In addition other code provides cross platform implementation of the major areas of game development.
This is the only book I know of that handles cross platform development in a manner anywhere near so completely.
