Hello all,

I'm new here, and not a programmer but obviously have an interest in computers/technology, blah, blah, blah.

I was curious to know if there's anything out there about cross console gaming. For example a user playing a game on a Mac being able to play someone else on a PS3 in the same game; or PC playing with XBOX, or PS3 playing with XBOX. I did some searches but didn't really find anything relevant or credible. Is this an impossible thing to accomplish based on technology limitations or is it more of a situation of too much red-tape?

Thanks,
Christian

There have been a few games that were cross platform. Shadowrun combined players from both Vista-PCs and Xbox 360s, though these are both Microsoft platforms. It is definitely not impossible, but the extra work it takes may be more than developers are willing to do given the benefits of the results. And there also may be some red tape involved.

CoolGamer48 Beat Me to mentioning shadowrun.

It took you 3 days to type that reply?

yeah, i don't check DaniWeb Often.

It seems to me that the only thing that prevents developers from doing just what you're describing more often is red-tape. From a purely technical point-of-view, there's nothing keeping programmers from developing a game that works on the Xbox, PSIII, and PC's (of course, the game would have to be developed to compile for all three platforms), and then use a specially designed server to unify the experience. This would be just the same as any game that is developed for both the PC and the Mac... two completely different platforms.

If the game's using TCP/IP or UDP for LAN/Internet-connection then it's not a problem at all to combine multiple platforms and consoles. Even the code has not to be different. The only fuss would be to implement TCP/UDP on all platforms and that is definately differnet when accessing the OS-specific functions.