The next great Mac Game Development Book

[igame3d]

Over at the another great idevgames MMORPG discussion I asked:

Where's these books some of you were supposed to be writing for five years?


To which there was this reply:

Personnally the real world of mortgages and other bills, setting up companies and developing exciting new products got in the way.

Exactly the same issues that come up in contests or individual development, there is nobody to pick up anyone's slack if they work alone and face the real world. iDevgames should, by now be shopping around for publishers of "Mac Game Development Gems" with a host of author's to list.

Please view Lua Programming Gems (http://www.lua.org/gems/selected.html) for an example of indivduals bringing what they have to a project that would be far too expansive for a single author.

I remember a conversation about publishing a few years ago, with people who contacted publishers who told them "there is no market for mac games programming books", might have been me talking to myself again...probably not though.

Since then new routes that cut out the old and dusty publishers have come about and new cool software for making mac games has made the scene.

Since then even Apple's web site has given Mac Game Development respect it didn't have in those earlier days.

Who here has had a book in the works?
Who has a page or more of anything on Mac Game Development written up?

Mark Szymczyk expects to have a new book out before the end of the year.

His prior Mac Game Programming (http://books.google.com/books?id=r0_is9ZWV4QC&dq=mac+game+programming+book&psp=1) is five years old now, and I've never seen it in a book store among the 20 "learn OS X in only 15,000 pages" titles. Briang Greenstones "Ultimate Game Programming Guide for Mac OS X" suffers the same "never seen in stores" fate.

There is an issue that both titles hold little interest to the majority of Mac users who are not and never want to be "programmers".

There needs to be "Mac game design and development", title because that 'design' word is what made Apple and the Mac community what it is today.
Apple and Mac developers win more awards for design than programming.

When is the last time your games have been reviewed at download portals with "stunning lines of code, i've never seen such sexy indenting"?
Doesn't happen, could happen in a book review though.

So anyway, I know some of you have something sitting on your hard drives or web servers.

Speak up and lets see where this goes.

[diordna]

I could really use a good Mac game dev book myself. If there were one that consolidated information on SDL, OpenGL, Carbon, and Cocoa, and focused exclusively on things that were pertinent to making games, I would buy it, read it, and become unstoppable, like two turtles duct taped together. As it is, it's a bit daunting to have to read separate books for each API and language.

Naturally, such a book couldn't cover everything, and there would probably have to be different books for 2D and 3D to really get it right.

[AnotherJake]

... Brian Greenstones "Ultimate Game Programming Guide for Mac OS X" suffers the same "never seen in stores" fate.

I remember reading somewhere a while back, when he put it out, that he said he had contacted publishers about the idea but they told him to take a hike because there was no market for such books. So what he did in response was to have a bunch of books printed and sent to him so that he could sell them through his site. He figured he'd at least break even with it, and last time I remember reading about it, that's just what happened.

I personally would love to chip in on a Mac game programming book. I actually started working on one a couple years ago but discovered after fifty pages or so just how hard it is. It was then that I realized how ridiculously large in scope the subject really is -- that is, if you are like me and can't do anything less than biting off more than one can chew.

I would suggest for any crew that dared to take on the task, identify the most commonly asked questions here at iDG and focus on those to narrow the scope of the book.

But in the end, and I hesitate to sound like a downer here, I suspect that such a project is not feasible to do in this community for some reason. There are a lot of super-smart folks here and the head-bumping would get in the way rather quickly, I would guess. It's not that it couldn't be done, but rather that it can be done so many different ways. Like for instance, what would the language and system API be? I'd say a thin Cocoa system layer and C for everything else. You will find zero consensus on that, I guarantee. It's like you'd have to have multiple books: One going my path, another going my path but Obj-C all the way, and another going my Path with C++ for the game core. Then do two more: One with C and SDL and another with C++ and SDL. Headaches dude, headaches...

[igame3d]

I think your concerns can be addressed by not letting anyone knock heads.

Like the Lua Gems (http://www.lua.org/gems/selected.html) book, people provide their area of expertise and the book covers as many subjects as are printable.

Somewhere in that bulk will be simple solutions and steps, followed up my some cracked out bi-polar 200 page treatise on all those issues you mention.

Note how the lua gems covers some of the same exact ground, yet is comes from a different perspective via a different author.

And yeah...thirty to fifty pages in is right about where most "non writers" start choking what they attempted to bite off, especially in a situation where you are coding, writing, double checking your code, correcting the writing, correcting your code, repeat rinse and spend time in a mental ward.

Thirty to fifty pages is also where you might lose your readers.

The compilation of Questions is a great idea, so whats the first question?

"How do I make a MMORPG?"

Second question
"I'm an artist/writer/sound guy/whatever, why is it so hard to find a Mac programmer to work with who doesn't tell me to go learn programming just so I can start making games?"


This could be very fun. :-)

[funkboy]

A wiki would be a good route for this, methinks.

Turning the wiki into a pdf / book would be the route to go.

[igame3d]

A wiki would be a good route for this, methinks.

Turning the wiki into a pdf / book would be the route to go.

Doesn't someone here host a wiki?

The first problem to drop kick with wiki's is that they get spammed by bots.

Someone from the dim3 boards had a backup of an idevgames member's wiki, when I went to edit one of the entries I found 100 lines of viagra or something embedded within. Checked two more entries and found the same thing.

When I informed said user he decided to wipe the wiki out instead of restore from a backup.

I'm sure people with more wiki experience know how to prevent something like this.
I know I've never had any luck posting links to hot porn sites on Keith's wiki. :lol:

[OneSadCookie]

I know I've never had any luck posting links to hot porn sites on Keith's wiki. :lol:

Heh.

Actually, you've just been looking in the wrong place... I discovered recently that I had over 200 bug reports insisting that I needed to implement viagra, or hot lesbian teen orgies, or that my office sluts were buggy.

So, I turned off all permission to do anything, as I already had for the wiki proper, and other sections of the trac ;)

There is still a wiki at http://gamewiki.evolpenguin.com/, and buried deep in the history under all the spam is still some good content. Looking at the commit comments will help you figure out which page version contains the goodies :)

[igame3d]

There is still a wiki at http://gamewiki.evolpenguin.com/, and buried deep in the history under all the spam is still some good content. Looking at the commit comments will help you figure out which page version contains the goodies :)

This was the wiki I was refering to, I guess he had second thoughts before annihilating it. Isn't it an duplicate of another wiki? I believe he said that it was and gave that as the reason for it being "ok" to drop the delete bomb.

[BeyondCloister]

I remember a conversation about publishing a few years ago, with people who contacted publishers who told them "there is no market for mac games programming books", might have been me talking to myself again...probably not though.

About 4 years ago I wrote to 5 or 6 publishers. Some came back saying Mac books were not their market. One came back and said that their last Mac gaming book had sold hardly any units in the last quarter so that meant there was no demand for such a book. The fact that their book was to do with OS 9 and OS X had been out for a couple of years was just pure coincidence. Of course who in their right mind would then trust such a publisher with their hard work?

Only one came back with anything close to positive but they wanted to change the direction of the concept. However they then failed to get back to me on any of my replies.

I got as far as around the 200 page mark. I was not going for the wizzy 3D graphics kind of thing though. I was going down the similar kind of route to a lot of the early game programming books of the 1980s. The simple concepts of learning programming in a fun environment. The FlipSquare (http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11979) tutorials I did for CreateMacGames followed the same style and level. An ideal kind of book for those wanting to learn when told they need some programming experience before tackling that MMORPG.

I also had a section about the pros and cons of jumping into big projects straight off and other pitfalls to watch out for.

[szymczyk]

A couple of years ago, I proposed a Mac game development gems book to Carlos as a fundraiser for iDevGames. The idea was discussed in the iDevGames chat room, and just about everybody preferred a book that built a complete game to a gems book. People couldn't agree on what game to make and couldn't agree on whether to make the book a programming book or a design/development book so the idea died.

If people are more open to a gems book now, wouldn't hosting the gems on iDevGames make sense? We're all here, iDevGames needs the content, and we wouldn't have to worry about spam on a wiki.

[igame3d]

Sounds like the discussion happened during a uDevgames contest, I almost recall it.

[QUOTE=szymczyk;127873
If people are more open to a gems book now, wouldn't hosting the gems on iDevGames make sense? We're all here, iDevGames needs the content, and we wouldn't have to worry about spam on a wiki.[/QUOTE]

A series of PDFS?
A series of forum threads in a new subsection?
Author designed web pages per chapter under an gems.idevgames subdomain?

Certainly something like this could work too, and working through someone like Lulu.com the content can be updated, posted, and printed by anyone who wants a hard copy to put on their local library bookshelf.

If Andrew already has 200 pages, and AnotherJake has 50, and we just keep naming names and counting pages, there will be a bulky volume ready to order off a self publishing site in no time, once we decide how to gather the material under one virtual roof.

[Zwilnik]

What about doing a "uDevGamesBook" competition?

Contestants have to write an article that could be used as a chapter in a Mac games book (any level or language, but maybe aimed as a more basic tutorial)?

Judging would potentially be a bit of a pain though :)

[Najdorf]

I believe nowadays there is even less market for *mac* games programming book than there was once, with bootcamp and great cross platform technology such as sdl and opengl.

[maximile]

What about doing a "uDevGamesBook" competition?

That's a very cool idea.

[igame3d]

I believe nowadays there is even less market for *mac* games programming book than there was once, with bootcamp and great cross platform technology such as sdl and opengl.

Likewise one could say "There is no market for *mac* games".
I do believe I've heard that mantra repeated at E3 and online too many times for the last decade.

The Xcode books don't cover games and go on for 600 pages about building currency converters and other boring apps. I picked up "Building Cocoa Applications" from the library and I have to thumb through some 300 pages before it even mentions a line of code.
So guess what? I won't even be opening Xcode except to build iGame3D from CVS by pressing one button.

Every game development book tells you how great Direct X is and how to do everything for .NET and for using Microsoft Visual something or other.

We are talking about millions of pages dedicated to windows development.
Tens of billions of dollars globally that Mac developers aren't seeing maybe .0001% of.

I go to the book store, any bookstore, and its row after row of "do something amazing with Windows", with a tiny subsection of "Mac OS X for dummies" and "itunes the missing manual"
and month after month the stock doesn't move, same damn books collect dust for five years.

An openGL book, or an SDL book doesn't cover anything about game design, project management, developing assets with Mac tools. None of that and because they don't cover these topics then they are completely and utterly useless to people who want to make games without gagging on hours of monotous and boring programming.

Not every game developer wants to program, nor do they want to reinvent the wheel as is too often done, just to make pong.

Thats why there is a need for an all around making games on a Mac book.
Covering design, production, programming as well as breaking into the market and industry.

I remember some here telling me there was no market for game making software on the Mac
and that nobody would ever make it, and that if they made it nobody would ever use it, and that it would never be useful in any way.

Funny how well Unity is doing just five years later.

Similiarly people here dissed Blender and Torque, and yet now there are what four Blender books and two Torque books or more. Hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.

Don't be short sighted, other people are already working on "books" and they deserve to be heard/read and make a real difference.

As for a contest, why not focus on collecting what is available, and then have a future contest address specific holes in the material, or addressing whatever an interested publisher desires after presenting what is already available, or addressing where the available material completely loses the new developer.

iDevgames does not have a good reputation of maintaining and consistantly hosting the material it has acquired from contests.

[BeyondCloister]

The track record of iDevGames putting any non forum content online is well known.

The best option for putting stuff online is to just host it completely separately. That way it is safe from website content management system changes / upgrades / downgrades. This also prevents getting stuck in the red tape of committees deciding what and what should not go in.

(Note: This was one of the reasons we ended up launching CreateMacGames)

[igame3d]

That is a good point. Its wise for individual writers to self host, but at the same time these forums are the ideal place to organize, advertise and guide new users to a common resource.

A single source of mac game dev tutorials seems necessary as so much is scattered across the internet.

For instance, had you not mentioned Flipsquare in this thread I would have never even remembered just how far you'd gone and what the name of the project was.

Dan has done a good job of piling the latest resources on the home page here, why not mirror those posts and build some central location for tracking the ever growing list in a subforum where its less likely to get buried in too many random locations?

I could just do that in this thread, but this more of a "hey who is doing or has done something and whats the next step" thread, and for some unexplainable reason Carlos has never given me god like power here...I wonder why :sneaky:

[BeyondCloister]

Forum threads are definitely not the place to list and link to the resources as they age so quickly.

If the forum was used though due to other parts of the site being closed to us then maybe they could be placed in sticky threads. These threads should be locked to prevent noise and clutter filing them up and distracting from the actual content.

[AnotherJake]

I remember some here telling me there was no market for game making software on the Mac...
I was one of those un-believers in Mac game making software. To some extent, I still believe the market is limited. Yeah, Unity seems to be doing pretty well, I readily admit that (and a well-deserved congratulations to them!). There is something really strange to me about the Mac game market nowadays. Apple has been selling massive amounts of new Macs every year now. Almost everyone I know either has one or is thinking about getting one. It wasn't like that just three years ago. So where the heck are all the new Mac game programming sites I would have expected? Where are all the great new games? And indeed, where are the books? I know that publishers are saying there is no market for them, but... there are an awful lot of new Macs out there nowadays!

A friend of mine told me that he dropped by iDG a few weeks ago to check it out and said he had no idea what people were talking about. There's no place for beginners here. No way to take the first steps other than to say, `Help I'm a N00b!!!', only to be quickly shredded to spit in one or two replies. Forums alone are a terrible single source of information -- especially beginners. But it seems like that's all the Mac game development community has to offer at the moment. "Anybody got any good tutorials on OpenGL and Cocoa?", will get the same 'ol replies we've been cranking out for years. Often times we are left to link to outdated material like NeHe. iDevGames seems to have distilled itself into a pack of talented folks, which seems to be a mixed blessing. It's good because the info to noise ratio is very high, but bad because it is not easily approachable IMHO.

I agree that there should be another site or two which handle community content. I don't think that another forum would be needed unless iDG went tits up, but separate content carriers would be great.

[BeyondCloister]

I think the best way forward for this is for a website to be set up that is nothing more than an index of links to these articles.

Nothing fancy would be required. Just a couple of pages would do. Another major advantage of having such a simple site is that there should be no bandwidth issues.

[PowerMacX]

Anyone knows what finally happened to the postmortems? Last thing I heard a proofreader was hired to check them, but that was months ago. I don't think a book could be made just out of them, but a few could probably be used to complement one, or simply to complement/exemplify tutorials.

[BeyondCloister]

My understanding was that all the postmortems were in the content management system. They were then proof read only never to be seen again. Maybe someone who has access to the content system can let us know if they are still there or not?

[sealfin]

My understanding was that all the postmortems were in the content management system. They were then proof read only never to be seen again. Maybe someone who has access to the content system can let us know if they are still there or not?

There are almost fifty postmortems in the CMS; at a quick glance, a few are marked as empty, and a few are quite short so I'm not sure if they're missing content or not - however, I'm not sure if any of those postmortems have been proof-read; I believe all the proof-read postmortems (and articles) are still waiting to be uploaded to the CMS...

I also have a dump of the CMS database from before the last major upheaval; I'm not sure if that contains any postmortems which are not currently present in the CMS...

[BeyondCloister]

I do remember there being postmortems in the CMS and looking over them as part of the review team prior to the official proof reader being employed. I would have thought that they were proof read and edited in the CMS and not taken out and put back in again.

I know my postmortem for Industrial Revolution was in there. Is it still in there? If it is do you have power to bring it online?

[igame3d]

Sounds to me like there is enough sitting on or waiting to be uploaded to the CMS to shop around to publishers, or at least to post to lulu.com or such places and make on demand publishing available.

It also sounds like a good time to archive whatever is in there, just in case something goes wrong. I am not familiar with CMS, so I'm not sure what its capable of spitting out.

To answer AnotherJake, more mac sales does not equal more Mac game dev resources, at least not equally. For instance the 300 macs across the street at the elementary school don't require it, the 35 macs at my last job (so many years ago) wouldn't need such material (hell they couldn't be bothered to read a magazine or access the help menu).

I started digging for some Mac game dev tutorials last night while posting and found a few, some for sale, some for free, which led to my "scattered" comment.

Contemplate this for a minute ,five years ago there were no Apple stores, today there are no game dev books in the Apple stores...a new game dev book could certainly make its way into upscale malls across the globe given this new venue.
I know the last time I was at the Apple store spending $400, there wasn't a single book on their shelves I wanted/needed/ or was even mildly interested in, and basically when Apple employees asked "Can I help you?", I very much wanted to reply "Not unless you are game developer".

Apple now has their "sit with a pro(who probably used to work next door at the gap), learn the mac" thing for $99 a year.

But I noticed a missing space in their offerings...zero help for coding, I couldn't help but think that would be the next offering and was going to email them and say "Hey what about Xcode, thats all I need", but the email I received had no feedback method.

Time to open iDevGames stores?

[sealfin]

I would have thought that they were proof read and edited in the CMS and not taken out and put back in again.

If I remember correctly, Carlos stated that the postmortems and articles were sent on to the professional proof-reader he hired, which would imply that the proof-reader was not granted access to the CMS; also, at one time the postmortems and articles were being proofed in a WordPress blog before being integrated back into the CMS, but I can't remember where that fits into the timeline of CMS changes...

So, there may be two differently proofed copies of the postmortems and articles existing outside the CMS.

I know my postmortem for Industrial Revolution was in there. Is it still in there? If it is do you have power to bring it online?

There is a postmortem of Industrial Revolution in the CMS; I'm not sure if it is complete or missing content however, as it seems quite short, ending on the line "Industrial Revolution is a game that contains a lot of behind the scenes game logic." (Edit: from a look at the copy at cloisterroom.com, the copy in the CMS is incomplete.)

Whilst I technically have the power to bring the postmortem online (copying the missing content from the copy at cloisterroom.com), I'm hesitant to do so, as that isn't the domain I was granted power over, and I'm hesitant about treading on toes or exceeding my powers; if however Carlos or whoever is in charge of the postmortems wants me to go through the postmortems and fix them for upload, I'll do so...

[AnotherJake]

To answer AnotherJake, more mac sales does not equal more Mac game dev resources, at least not equally. For instance the 300 macs across the street at the elementary school don't require it, the 35 macs at my last job (so many years ago) wouldn't need such material (hell they couldn't be bothered to read a magazine or access the help menu).
Well, obviously that is entirely true. I think my point was that I see so many more private individuals using them outside of a work environment. Not that this helps make my case for individual use, but I read a story somewhere on the net today where Sun even added engineers to their Mac product because they had noticed all the Macbooks in use at airports and conferences. I was trying to balance my observation with the fact that forums aren't an ideal source of information for beginners, to help make the case that there may very well be a sizable market for such material as we are discussing. Of course, I do understand I'm preaching to the choir here, but still.

As for the postmortems, they are property of iDG, aren't they? I mean, unless they can be liberated from iDG, why bother? I know Carlos would like to have content available on the site, but it's literally been years since... never mind. I suppose I am suggesting that the group focus may be better served by looking entirely away from resources associated with iDevGames and just forgetting about them for now, as it seems to be a resource black hole of sorts.

[BeyondCloister]

There is a postmortem of Industrial Revolution in the CMS; I'm not sure if it is complete or missing content however, as it seems quite short, ending on the line "Industrial Revolution is a game that contains a lot of behind the scenes game logic." (from a look at the copy at cloisterroom.com, the copy in the CMS is incomplete.)

Well that confirms that the completed ones we had worked on have been removed :mad:

[BeyondCloister]

I've created a sticky thread to list the resources. I see this as a temporary home until a website is set up to hold the links.

http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthread.php?t=13951

[BeyondCloister]

I've registered the domain www.thegameresource.com. I will be setting up a site for the resource links in the next week or so.

[AnotherJake]

I've registered the domain www.thegameresource.com. I will be setting up a site for the resource links in the next week or so.
You rock, BeyondCloister! The name is totally kick a$$ too. And thanks for the initiative on the resource sticky thread!

[edit] Oh yeah, and thanks to iGame3d for nudging the subject down the path!

Mac game developers for ages to come will sing songs of praise in your names!

[igame3d]

Wow that other thread is taking off like lighting.

Awesome job folks!
:D

[Najdorf]

Back to the topic what I dont have clear is what should be in a "mac game developement" book. I mean what do you assume the reader already knows of programming-game programming? There are quite a few options on how to make games on the mac: you can use unity, blitzmax, sdl+opengl, cocoa+opengl, etc. (some of the are x-platform) You can then list various programs you can use for gfx/models.

Now after you give an introduction for all these, how do you go on? You make a separate section for each one of these? You explain the programming basics for a 2D game? The basic 3D concepts? How to make stuff with unity? How to setup a cocoa+opengl project? An introduction to objective-c? How to draw a model with blender? How to setup a mac-shareware business? All in a book?

I think a beginner needs a hand getting into the game programming logic and getting something working fast. Say a book like "Games Programming for the Absolute Beginner with Blitzmax" to get you started. Once you got a good idea of how game dev works in general, you then need more "in depth" knowlegde on the topic of your interest, such as "Making 3D games with opengl" (making titles up), or "game programming with C++", or "making games with unity", "making models with blender" or stuff like that. "Developing games on the Mac" is too broad to be useful IMO.

[AnotherJake]

That's what I was saying on page one of this thread. There's really no way to do only one book on it. One introductory chapter could be common amongst all of them, but everything else would be mostly hard to mesh into one tome. Sounds more like the Mac Game Programming Encyclopedia when you look at it like that though!

[igame3d]

There is no reason one book must cover it all or be all to everyone.
Just a great introduction to Mac game design, production and programming could do the job and make a difference.
I do feel that a "just programming" book doesn't fit the Mac community.

Without seeing the inside of Mark's next book, I feel kind of blind on this at the moment.
Seeing the book, and reading reviews of that book will certainly help in pointing out where there
is a reasonable gap that can be filled, instead of the huge hole that exists today.

Meanwhile I direct your attention to
Game Programming All in one (http://books.google.com/books?id=iTWvZTkvPIgC&pg=PA66&ots=gmf7gG_Mtq&dq=3d+Game+Programming+All+in+one&sig=uycIopZdUcc2zdAet3rZQhaULqk#PPR8,M1)
3D Game Programming All in one (http://books.google.com/books?id=iTWvZTkvPIgC&dq=Game+Programming+All+in+one&pg=PP1&ots=gmf7gG_Mpn&sig=bb6BIYa3Zpa31RtW3iyr24WfaQk&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fclient%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26q%3DGame%2BP rogramming%2BAll%2Bin%2Bone%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title)
and
And any of these other books (http://books.google.com/books?ct=title&psp=1&q=3d+Game+Programming+All+in+one&btnG=Search+Books) that aren't going to mention the Mac.

Their table of contents should give you and idea of how it could be accomplished and what could to be inside of it.

I'm partial to these nice slim $9.99 ...In Easy Steps (http://www.ineasysteps.com/) books from Computer Step, you'll note there is
a gap in their extensive selection for anything Xcode or anything Games.

The books are generally under 200 pages, I bought the C and C++ books and get through more pages
than most other volumes, but still find learning coding alone without a set game or game utility goal
bores me to sleep. Not the books fault, I should probably try getting more than four hours sleep
before I get inspired to learn programming.

Here's a link to their "Write for Us" (http://www.ineasysteps.com/company/write/) submission form. Lets flood them with options. :-)
It looks like a few of you are already on the way to completing
something that could fit right into their line up.

[AnotherJake]

I actually have 3D Game Programming All in One. To me it represents the antithesis of what we're talking about here. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice book and all -- if and only if you want to make games using Torque on a Windows PC.

I agree that "just programming" doesn't really make much sense. In fact, probably the greatest difficulty I have faced in my own projects has been creating content rather than the underlying code. Actually, creating it isn't so tough if you have access to something like Maya, but then learning to export that content and subsequently import it into one's own real-time engine is itself worth an entire volume. I might even go so far as to say that of all the issues with game development on the Mac, the content pipeline has the biggest holes. I've personally tried many different packages, and have even started a 3D editor project of my own (which is currently stalled). Interestingly, today I just decided to give Cheetah3D a serious try for a while and see how that goes. The latest version appears to have most of the features small-time game devs need. But I'm getting off track here...

I tend to like smaller 200 page books on specific topics as well. They seem to be much more digestible sized chunks of knowledge than the All-in-Ones.

[igame3d]

All valid points.
I pointed to the All in ones as a reference for what might be in a humongous book.
Its certainly worth discussing where books go bad.

The content pipeline situation is a problem, I feel like we've
been jumping through hoops for years trying to solve that.

"Secrets of the Mac Game Content Pipeline Gurus"...good theme for a book eh?

[OneSadCookie]

From my perspective, the problem isn't really "secrets of the mac millionaire game content pipeline gurus" -- if you can afford Maya and Photoshop then you're not a lot worse off than the PC guys. It's the "secrets of the mac student/indie game content pipeline gurus" that's the issue :)

I'm no artist at the best of times, but I find GIMP difficult and Blender impossible. I quite like Wings, but it only does organic stuff well, and doesn't do animation at all.

Writing format conversion code is annoying, but not really rocket science, and I don't see a book filled with specific examples actually helping anyone a great deal on that front.

[DoG]

Well, writing even an article for a book or just on its own, and creating the supplementary source code and working examples, is a lot of f***ing work.

Also, writing Mac specific game stuff seems to be mostly limited to a) workflow, b) beginner's topics, and c) leveraging Cocoa for games.

[OneSadCookie]

Well, writing even an article for a book or just on its own, and creating the supplementary source code and working examples, is a lot of f***ing work.

Tell me about it; why do you think http://onesadcookie.com/book is so incomplete (and these days, so out of date...)

[AnotherJake]

Writing format conversion code is annoying, but not really rocket science, and I don't see a book filled with specific examples actually helping anyone a great deal on that front.
To be clear, I wasn't talking about simple format conversion or loading a .obj file, but rather exporting entire scenes worth of data, including skeletal animation, morph targets, terrain data, and so on.

[OneSadCookie]

It's the same sort of deal... you've got the data in some format, you want it in another. Doesn't much matter what either of those formats are...

[AnotherJake]

I don't see how you can claim that it's all easy. It took me weeks to learn how to extract skeletal animation data from Maya and implement it in my own real-time environment.

[OneSadCookie]

Sure, but there are two questions there -- one, the amount of time you spent learning about skeletal animation (which can usefully be taught in general terms in a book), and two, the amount of time you spent fighting with Maya, your own format, and the actual conversion process (which can't usefully be taught in a book, because the information both about Maya and about your own format is far too specialized).

[igame3d]

I don't see how you can claim that it's all easy. It took me weeks to learn how to extract skeletal animation data from Maya and implement it in my own real-time environment.

Didn't Brian Greenstone cover that in his book specifically?
Maybe he just got models in there, I don't know, the book was way over my head.

A book with various file conversion tutorials actually would be helpful,
I have access to all kinds of file formats and SDK's but absolutely no
idea where to start. Most of the research in where to start seems to
always lead to "get another software package, and learn another language".

There are apps on the PC that specifically convert 3D files to any number of other formats.
We don't have such a utility on the mac yet.
It looks like the guys at Retropalette (http://www.retropalette.com/rpQuickApps.htm) may have something for us as soon as Apple ships 10.5.
They did not respond to my enthusiastic e-mails.

So is collada a solution to this file format for games mess?
From what I've been reading it seems that is what it tries to do.
When I get to the documents about implementation my brain melts.

[Carlos Camacho]

Anyone knows what finally happened to the postmortems? Last thing I heard a proofreader was hired to check them, but that was months ago. I don't think a book could be made just out of them, but a few could probably be used to complement one, or simply to complement/exemplify tutorials.
See the thread here:
http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthread.php?p=127968

[AnotherJake]

Carlos! You're alive!!!

Sure, but there are two questions there -- one, the amount of time you spent learning about skeletal animation (which can usefully be taught in general terms in a book), and two, the amount of time you spent fighting with Maya, your own format, and the actual conversion process (which can't usefully be taught in a book, because the information both about Maya and about your own format is far too specialized).
Okay, fair enough. You have a point in there somewhere, even if it's a bit vague.

I'm still not sure why you seem to be campaigning against the idea of sharing techniques, even if they are somewhat specialized. It's not like we have many (any?) standards when it comes to content pipelines. But whatever... Whatever I've done myself is certainly not very special. And like you said earlier, it ain't rocket science. Figure it out for yourself I guess...

Didn't Brian Greenstone cover that in his book specifically?
No. He did not cover skeletal animation at all, whatsoever, in any way. I was pretty disappointed about that subtle omission. What he covered was getting basic mesh geometry out of Maya by writing a plug-in for it using Maya API. Maya API is *horrible*. It is an excellent example of how NOT to use C++. I had successfully developed a few small plug-ins myself using his book as the starting point, only to discover later how much nicer MEL was (Maya's scripting language).

To my knowledge, there are no skeletal animation tutorials of any kind for game programming on the Mac, let alone MEL scripting for game programming on the Mac. I would guess that if there is any info in that direction to be found at all, it'd probably be found somewhere in the Unity community, but I haven't visited there in a while. If there is any readily available info now, it certainly didn't show up on Google back when I was learning it.:p

[OneSadCookie]

I'm not arguing against sharing the knowledge, just that the m*n possibilities for source and destination formats don't lend themselves to a book. If you're not interested in the particular combination under discussion, the content's not useful to you. The chance that any particular person is interested in any particular combination is slim.

So, documentation on individual formats is useful (and there's plenty of good stuff out there on the internet), but "tutorials" on specific format conversion issues are of seriously limited usefulness.

Also, these topics are not Mac-specific in any sense. Sure, any given tutorial for the PC might use Direct3D rather than OpenGL and therefore have slightly less relevance, but in most cases that's the least relevant part of the material.

There is the issue of how to make this stuff accessible to "newbies", who lack the experience or knowledge to read the documentation and make stuff go, but I think that's a separate issue, and one much better solved with libraries and tools than with a lot of words.

[AnotherJake]

I'm not arguing against sharing the knowledge, just that the m*n possibilities for source and destination formats don't lend themselves to a book. If you're not interested in the particular combination under discussion, the content's not useful to you. The chance that any particular person is interested in any particular combination is slim.
By that logic then, it shouldn't matter that...

So, documentation on individual formats is useful (and there's plenty of good stuff out there on the internet), but "tutorials" on specific format conversion issues are of seriously limited usefulness.
... they are almost always about formats for Windows ...

Also, these topics are not Mac-specific in any sense. Sure, any given tutorial for the PC might use Direct3D rather than OpenGL and therefore have slightly less relevance, but in most cases that's the least relevant part of the material.
... and that I can't really relate to them in any significant way like the folks on the intended platform do.

There is the issue of how to make this stuff accessible to "newbies", who lack the experience or knowledge to read the documentation and make stuff go, but I think that's a separate issue, and one much better solved with libraries and tools than with a lot of words.
hmph...:\

[OneSadCookie]

I'm afraid I really don't know what you're getting at any more.

To write format conversion code
1) understand the problem domain
2) read documentation for format(s)
3) write conversion code

Tutorials on 1) (eg. the principles of skeletal animation) are useful. 2) is already documentation, and if you can't do 3) then either the documentation in 2) was useless, or you need some more programming experience.

If it's the case that you simply need more programming experience, then I agree, you shouldn't be prohibited from doing the conversion, but the chance that there is a tutorial for the specific two formats you've chosen is slim, and the chance that you could follow it if there was is slim. Much better to have a third-party library which loads a (possibly different) destination format, and a tool which converts from the source format to that destination format.

The scope of writing tutorials which cover conversion between all possible format pairs is m*n; the scope of writing libraries and tools is m -- it's a much more rewarding and worthwhile endeavor.

[AnotherJake]

I'm afraid I really don't know what you're getting at any more.
Cute. It's plainly obvious that you and I exist on two completely different planes of exsistence -- yours wrong and mine right :p

To write format conversion code:
1) understand the problem domain: I need to get this stuff from here to there
2a) read documentation for format... Oh yeah, I'm on a Mac, they didn't target documentation for this format, never mind...
2b) figure it out
2c) come up with plan to improvise
3) write conversion code

... and (according to you):

4) don't share, because anyone working in this problem space will already know how to solve it on their own or they shouldn't have been programming here to begin with

m*n what?

The question is, what are *you* getting at?

[igame3d]

Not to piss on your fire guys, but this month's Game Developer
magazines goes into some detail about Collada. Just thought I'd let you know.

wizzzzzz....pssssss

[OneSadCookie]

File formats are platform-independent, and documentation on them is therefore platform-independent. I don't know what you're trying to hint at there.

I also don't read tutorials and go "oh look, they're using glDrawElements rather than display lists, *that* must be the crucial decision here" just as I don't go "oh look, they're using Direct3D, *that* must be the only way to do this".

In less than a year, OpenGL as we know it will fade from existence, to be replaced by the new "Mount Evans" API... are you going to completely dismiss all tutorials written against the current OpenGL API when that happens?

There are concepts, and there are details. I believe that tutorials need to focus on the concepts, and only give enough details to be understood by the target audience. The more details the tutorial includes, the less its long-term relevance, and the more distracted it becomes from the crucial point, of actually improving the reader's understanding, rather than their superficial knowledge.

And I certainly didn't say "don't share", I just don't see the point in writing a lot of words writing out a tutorial on how to do your particular conversion when all of 3 people will ever care about that exact combination again.

m reasonable source formats times n reasonable destination formats. That's how many conversion tutorials need to be written.

If you have a library which loads a particular destination format, then you need m (reasonable source formats) tools to do the conversion.

[PowerMacX]

m reasonable source formats times n reasonable destination formats. That's how many conversion tutorials need to be written.

Well, I would pick "example" formats to show a real-world implementation of say, static formats (a basic implementation of an .obj loader, for instance), keyframe-based formats (something simple, like md2) and skeleton-based animation formats. Just because the specific format chosen on the book may not match the one you want to use doesn't mean it couldn't be useful, at least in the sense of helping visualize what is involved.

[AnotherJake]

File formats are platform-independent, and documentation on them is therefore platform-independent. I don't know what you're trying to hint at there.
I am trying to say (not hint) that articles, documentation, tutorials, or whatever, are hardly *ever* written with the Mac in mind. Sure, file formats are generally platform-independent in nature, but that is completely side-stepping away from the discussion, which is to help make it easier for Mac programmers to comprehend how to implement those formats on the Mac. And beyond that, I'm not even talking about file formats specifically, but rather to also include a tutorial or two about scripting languages within environments, such as Maya, to be able to export scene data to arbitrary, possibly custom, formats before it even hits the disk. Sure, you could simply teach Python or MEL (both used in Maya) as languages and say, "there you go, now get the data you need", but wouldn't it also be helpful to include some examples of how to traverse the scene graph? You seem to be suggesting not, and I am suggesting that even though those examples might not specifically yield the exact format you're looking for, there would likely be information that you could use to extrapolate from to create the format your looking for. So, I simply disagree with you on your point that one would have to write m*n tutorials or whatever. Like what PowerMacX said, what would be wrong with a few representative examples? You seem to be insisting that you have to do all variations or none at all.

I also disagree with you on concepts versus details in tutorials. I would rather tutorials focus on details, even if they are not the exact details that I'm looking for, rather than broad, long-standing concepts for all of eternity to witness. For a given problem, I might even drop my current approach in favor of the detailed approach given in a tutorial, simply because it offered a workable standing solution.