Hey! I just joined the forum and will be lurking around hopefully in the future. I wanted to say I am excited to join in the community and hope to contribute. I will be making an independent multi platform game with a team of like minded people. One of the snags we are overcoming right now is I am a windows programmer and he is a mac/linux programmer. Our technologies differ. So! My questions are as follows for anyone kind enough to help. I am also open to advice and direction.

1.Does anyone know of a good way to create a UML Class diagram for free that can be opened by both mac and windows?

2. Does anyone have any advice for what kind of IDE we could use so that we could work on both a mac and a windows machine? Is it possible?

1. Violet UML (Java) -- haven't used this much, but does provide an acceptable UI under OS X. No idea about Windows nor Linux.

2. CMake w/ auto-generated project files for whatever IDE of individual's choice (i.e.: Xcode, Visual Studio, Unix Makefiles). It'll take a bit of time learning the basics of CMake and getting it to generate things the way you prefer, though. Alternatives to CMake might include Code::Blocks, Eclipse. Not familiar at all with those. Personally, I chose the CMake route, and it does works reasonably well, provided you are willing to spend the time on it (documentation on things aren't always straight forward). I auto-generate project files for Xcode or Visual Studio for when I need a debugger and use Sublime Text with build settings tailored towards clang and msbuild for use with building my projects from within the editor.

Eclipse is crossplatform now it seems... Used eclipse a lot, both during university and now on the job as business dev... mainly for Java, but also for Shell / Perl Unix development. Eclipse is not liked by everybody, but I think it is still a fine IDE, especially when developing in Java.

Xamarin is Crossplatform and seems to have an IDE, Xamarin Studio (though I am not 100% sure the Studio also runs on Win, I just guess so). Might be an alternative if you want to use C#.

Thanks for the suggestions, fit my needs perfectly