Apple has recently lowered the price on the Mac Developer Program to a $99 price point, a drop from its earlier tiered structure. The price point draws obvious parallels to the successful iPhone Developer Program (although the two are different). Current benefits of this new program are still in flux, and there are no clear guidelines as to what this will include or lose from previous version of the program.
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Yesterday, several sites received teaser images suggesting that Valve was planning to make the Steam distribution platform available for Mac. MacNN later obtained confirmation about Valve’s plans to “port some of it’s most popular games to the Mac” from their marketing VP, Doug Lombardi. An official announcement is expected at next week’s Game Developers Conference.
One of the teaser images specifically mentions Steam:
The games alluded to in the other teaser images are:
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The Pragmatic Programmers have just released a new book aimed at new Mac Developers with no previous programming experience. The book covers many topics for new programmers and applies them to both Mac OS X and the iPhone OS. The book is Beginning Mac Programming: Develop with Objective-C and Cocoa by Tim Isted. The book is available from their website in book or ebook format (DRM Free), and on Amazon. List price is $34.95 from The Pragmatic Programmers, or $22.00 for the ebook version. It’s $23.07 on Amazon.
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The Franklin Group released Franklin 3D 1.0, a professional 3d game and simulation engine that integrates with Runrev 4, the cross platform software design system from Mirye Software and Runrev. Franklin 3D 1.0 for Runrev Pro can build cross-platform, hardware accelerated games for Mac OS X (with OpenGL). Franklin 3D includes over 400 methods, including support for display control, model loading and callbacks. It includes the engine plus a collection of example projects.
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Cheetah3D 5.3 was released today. The biggest change in Cheetah3D 5.3 is undoubtedly the 64-bit version for Intel 64-bit CPUs. Now Cheetah3D can use all the memory installed in your Mac, and will allow you to create much more complex scenes. To deal with these complex scenes, the Cheetah3D raytracing core has been accelerated considerably, and Altivec/SSE optimized.
On the user interface side, the already convenient and easy-to-use Render Manager has been rewritten completely and is now even better. For example, for easier finding of old render jobs, a thumbnail preview is now available. The pose manager functionality has moved to a tag to allow saving poses locally and making it more conveninent and faster to work with character poses.
Howling Moon Software announced an update to Chipmunk Physics, the powerful 2D physics engine used in many hit iPhone, Mac, PSP, and even Nintendo DS games. Version 5.2.0 includes several major optimizations, a few small fixes, and includes the new Objective-C wrapper and utility functions. Objective-Chipmunk provides native integration with the Objective-C’s memory management model and also provides many convenience methods for common setup tasks. It includes the Chipmunk Object Protocol which facilitates the easy addition of Chipmunk bodies and joints to the space. It also lets you easily create compound objects and keep your physics code organized. The binding also has numerous helpful iPhone features which allow you to easily interact with the Cocoa Touch libraries. A full and complete published iPhone game is included with the binding, so you have a great set of examples and a starting point for your program.
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Led by CEO Neil Young, a former executive from Electronic Arts, startup ngmoco has purchased top Mac and iPhone game developer Freeverse. ngmoco’s is known for their ngmoco free-to-play games TouchPets and Eliminate. nhmoco is also famous for their mobile social networking platform, plusplus. In other Freeverse news, they just announce a free game for the iPhone and iTouch, Parachute Ninja.
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CRM32Pro is a free SDK written in C++ and built on top of SDL that facilitates the creation of cross-platform games. Begun in 2001, the SDL-based SDK is perfect for quickly creating games in 2D with the option to use OpenGL to develop games in 2D/3D. For Mac OS X, the SDK offers:
As mentioned, CRM32Pro supports OpenGL to accelerate 2D blitting operations. Other notable features include scaled surfaces with smooth filter, GUI, optimized collision system between sprites and surfaces, and automatic smooth sprites movement (using interpolation). The included editor however seems to be Windows-only.
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cocos2d for iPhone is a open source framework for building 2D games, demos, and other graphical/interactive applications. The latest update now supports iPad at the new native 1024×768 resolution. There is also a number of improvements to the camera as well as speed improvements to a number of components.
Related Links: Cocos2d for iPhone
RunRev announced that it will bring its Revolution product line to mobile platforms in 2010. revMobile is a brand new product that will support iPhone, iPad, Windows Mobile and Maemo platforms initially. revMobile will be compatible with other members of the Rev product family and uses the company’s revTalk programming language. A modern descendant of natural-language technologies such as Apple’s HyperCard, Rev enables software construction for everyone. With revMobile, developers will be able to develop and deploy to mobile platforms using a single code base, while being able to take advantage of native features on each device. Additionally it will be possible to reuse code across Windows, Mac OS and Linux desktops, popular Web browsers and on Web servers.
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