MacWorld 2005 Game Hall of Fame
MacWorld has put up their list of the best Mac games of 2005.
Of particular note is DanLabGames’ Jammin’ Racer, in the ‘Best use of a steering wheel’ category.
MacWorld 2005 Game Hall of Fame
This tutorial covers some of the more advanced concepts involved in 3D terrain programming such as frustum culling and LOD (Level Of Detail)
Supporting Developers of Original Mac Games
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA—NOVEMBER 29th, 2005—PureStatic (www.purestatic.com) supports original Mac games, and the developers who produce them with on demand High Volume File Hosting for the OMG Cup 2005 Finalists. “As iDevGames’ preferred on demand High Volume file hosting partner, we are delighted to offer the six finalists of the OMG Cup 2005 the following prizes: 1st place – 1 year, 2nd place – 10 months, 3rd place – 8 months, 4th place – 6 months, 5th place – 4 months, 6th place – 60 days”, said Jay Menna, CEO of PureStatic. (Information related to these prizes is available at http://www.macminicolo.net/omg05.html.)
- Play OMG Cup 2005 Games Now!
Fraser Speirs sings praises of Apple’s IDE, Xcode. In this short write-up, he tells of what he thinks Apple has done right, and what it needs to add to Xcode. Personally I long for the days of the 1.X builds, where code-completion was much more streamlined.
TNT Basic 1.3 Source Code Released
Mark Tully has informed us that the source for TNT Basic 1.3 has finally been released. TNT Basic allows anyone, regardless of previous experience, to make games for the Macintosh. Its easy to use development environment allows you to compose all your game’s graphics, sounds, music and code with simplicity and ease. The source code for the Hieroglyph IDE will be released in the near future. Complete details can be found at the link below.
- TNT Basic Press Release
- SourceForge: TNT Basic Project
Advanced Cross-platform Java Game Programming Library
Golden T Game Engine (GTGE) is an advanced cross-platform game programming library written in Java language. GTGE library provides a complete routines for making 2D game from low level routines such as hardware accelerated 2D graphics, mouse and keyboard input, audio support, game timing, to game specific routines such as sprite, background, collision detection. A few reasons why you should try out GTGE:
- GTGE is fast. With the support of OpenGL, you can get fully hardware accelerated graphics rendering (2D in 3D).
- GTGE is really easy to use. We always keep everything simple, you can hold our word!
- GTGE is cross-platform. Code your game once and your game can be running in Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and other platform flawlessly.
- GTGE is actively developed. With the focus on 2D game, we concentrate only to one thing, making 2D game easily.
- GTGE is free. Although GTGE is free, that doesn’t mean the support is poor, all questions will likely get answered within a day!
Developing Games in Java
Klink Software Releases dim3 v1.1
Brian Barnes, of Klink Software, has announced the release of dim3 v1.1. dimension3 is an open source 3D game creation tool targeted at Mod Makers and Coders. dim3 is capable of creating FPS, adventure games, 2D side scrollers, RPGs, driving & racing and many other games. This latest release fixes a number of bugs and problems with the test 1.1 release, and adds a couple new features. It does not work with Mac OS X 10.2.8—the old binary and old code archive will remain on the Klink! Software site. dim3 is Mac OS X only, however there is talk of porting to other platforms.
- Klink Software
- iDevGames Forum: dim3 Message Board
- dim3 v1.1 Announcement
Game Developers' Bill of Rights Published
Inspired by, and borrowing liberally from, Scott McCloud’s Bill of Rights for Comic Creators, Eric Zimmerman, author of the book Rules of Play, has published a Bill of Rights for Game Developers, an initial outline of thirteen issues to be addressed by game developers and publishers.
Game Developers’ Bill of Rights at Gamasutra
Cross-platfrom RTS Gaming Engine
Stratagus is a free cross-platform real-time strategy gaming engine. It includes support for playing over the internet/LAN, or playing a computer opponent. The engine is configurable and can be used to create games with a wide-range of features specific to your needs. See the data sets page for a list of current games using the stratagus engine. Software Requirements:
- Mac OS X, Win32, Linux, BSD, Possibly any other Unix/POSIX OS
- SDL, libpng, zlib, Lua (required)
Recommended: - libogg/libvorbis
- libmikmod
Optional: - libbzip2
- libFLAC
- libmad
To install Stratagus on Mac OS X, extract the “contrib/macosx.tgz” file to the top-level directory and read “Read Me.rtf” Game Development With LUA
Open Source Myst Interface Engine
The original Myst was written in HyperCard (with some custom code) and modeled in StrataVision 3D. Though graphic adventures like the ones produced by Presto Studios seem to be a thing of the past, there is still a good deal of interest in their creation. If that last statement has your head shaking in yes, then be sure to check out Pyzzle, a tool based on Python (Pygame) that is devoted to making Myst and Riven-like games. Games authored with Pyzzle will run on all platform that Pygame supports including Mac OS X, Windows, NT4, BeOS, FreeBSD, IRIX, and Linux. However, Pyzzle can only generate stand-alone games for Win32 at this time. Current features:
- Use Python to control all elements of your game. AKA puzzle building.
- Use any display size 640×480, 800×600,1024×768 etc…
- Over-slide movie playback through mpeg files.
- Ambient sound and music through wav files with sound fx through (.wav) files.
Tthe stand-alone creation process, as mentioned above, is Windows-only and performed via py2exe. Since I know little about Python, I can only point users to py2app, which I assume will function for Mac OS X as py2exe does on the Windows platform—convert Python scripts into standalone Mac OS X applications. py2app
From Myst to Riven (The makings of MYST through RIVEN)
Great Alternative to Corel's Painter
ArtRage is a painting package designed to provide a realistic and fun simulation of using paint on a canvas, along with pens, pencils, crayons, and other tools. It can be used with a mouse, but works better if you have a graphics tablet.
ArtRage is a painting package designed provide a natural and easy to use environment for producing art on your computer. By providing realistic tools such as oil paints and pencils, and simulating the real world dynamics of those media, ArtRage allows any user to play around with paint without the expense and mess of its real world counterpart. By providing Tracing tools, ArtRage lets any level of user produce paintings based on photographs or other existing images.
ArtRage is available for both Mac OS X and Windows and is released as donationware.
iGame Radio Chats with DanLabGames
iDevGames regulars Daniel Labriet and F.C. Covett of DanLabGames will be on tonight’s broadcast of iGame Radio, playing live at 6p.m. Eastern time / 8p.m. Central time / Tuesday from 0200 to 0330 UTC.
Daniel Labriet and F.C. Covett have developed such diverse titles as Owari, a 3D rendered Mancala-style game; Mahjong Solitarus, which features a layout editor for endless gameplay variation; and Islands Mini-Golf, providing 54 holes of 3D putting across a series of locales and featured by Apple on their Mac games website.
DanLabGamesSpe is a free python IDE with auto indentation & completion, call tips, syntax coloring & highlighting, UML diagrams, class explorer, source index, auto todo list, sticky notes, pycrust shell, file browsers, drag&drop, context help, and Blender support. Spe ships with Python debugger (remote & encrypted), wxGlade (gui designer), PyChecker (source code doctor) and Kiki (regex console). Mac OS X has just been added and the developers are taking donations to help fund further development for our platform. They need to raise 650 Euros and need just 50 Euros more—if this IDE is of interest to you, please visit their donations sm_donate page.
Dusty is a nice realtime 3D Smoke Simulator which allows for the simulation of smoke and fire in realtime. The simulation is based on the Stable Fluids Algorithm from Jos Stam. Some highlights include:
- With a flexible scripting system one can build and animate scenes.
- Containing obstacles can be placed within the simulation universum to affect the fluid in a near realistic way.
- Created with the TEKlib and FLTK toolkit.
Dusty is available for Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows.
Creating 2D and 3D Trees on the Mac
Over the last few months, iDevGames’ forum has had post on tree textures, a developer looking for pine tree textures, and more recently, a thread on making trees. On the commercial side, one of the most advanced 3D tree creation apps if by Onyx Computing and comes is available as a plugin for Electric Image. For those with VirtualPC, the low-cost Windows app TreemagikG3 should be looked at, since it excels at creating low polygon trees. A great “free” alternative is Arbaro, which is written in Java and exports to DXF/OBJ. In the 2D realm, DigiArts Software markets several CD/DVD-ROMs for popular image editors that can be used to create complete trees or textures. If you’re in the market for a complete 3D modeling and rendering application, that won’t cost you a kidney, I highly recommend Carrara 5, as it contains a nice tree generator amongst many other great tools for game developers.
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