Thursday, November 3, 2011

Announcing Infinite Flight for iOS! (iPad/iPhone)

Fellow Pilots !

We are proud to officially announce Infinite Flight for iOS !

In the next few months, anybody with an iPod, iPhone or iPad will be able to experience Infinite Flight.
Multiplatform support is one of the most requested feature and after weeks of hard work this is finally something that will soon become a reality.

What does this mean for existing Windows Phone users ? Both versions are in fact from the same code base (see bellow for details), that means that we will have feature parity at all time. More users also means more feedback which will help us making Infinite Flight an even better flight simulator.

For those interested in the details of how this was made possible in such a short time, continue reading after the break.

Infinite Flight on iOS


Porting to iOS from Windows Phone is not an easy task. Both platforms have fundamental differences and require use of their own development tools.
Thanks to the great work from the guys at Xamarin with MonoTouch and Monodevelop, we were able to quickly have something up and running with minimum code changes. The biggest challenge was indeed the 2D (UI) and 3D (terrain + plane) rendering since XNA is obviously not available on iOS.
Enters Monogame. Monogame is a port of XNA to Mono/MonoTouch/MonoDroid using OpenTK (C# toolkit including OpenGL ES, OpenAL ... etc). When we first started to evaluate Monogame, only 2D was working; we still decided to give it a go and add the missing functionality ourselves to also have 3D support.
There is still lots of work to be done but the result we've achieved so far is beyond our wildest expectations.

We have no pricing and availability details to share at this time but expect more news from us soon via twitter, facebook or this blog.

Official press release available here.

Happy iLandings,