Posted on June 17th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Liquid War is available for several platforms, and now Mac OS X. Back in 2003, we reported that the game was built on the C/C++ game programming library Allegro“. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Liquid War is a unique multiplayer wargame. Its rules are truly original and have been invented by Thomas Colcombet. You control an army of liquid and have to try and eat your opponents. A single player mode is available, but the game is definitely designed to be multiplayer, and has network support. While the eye candy is outdated, the game play is good.In addition, the latest release, Liquid War 6, has some features which are nowhere to be found in Liquid War 5, such as multiple layers.
Posted on June 16th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Intel’s Level Up 2009 is a contest that invites professional, aspiring, and student game developers around the world to create demos with its products and compete for Best Threaded Game, Best Game-on-the-Go, and Best Game Optimized for Intel Graphics. Sadly, the rules seem to indicate DirectX as a requirement for all categories. Odd, as Intel supplies Apple with their CPUs and some graphic chips. Intel is giving away prizes, including computers, cash, and GDC passes, to the winners in three categories — Best Threaded Game, Best Game-on-the-Go, and Best Game Optimized for Intel Graphics. Contest registration ends soon with the deadline on July 1st, and participants must submit any detailed abstracts, screenshots, and movies of their game demos before that deadline. Judges will then pick the top ten scoring entries in each of the three categories by August 10th. The winners will be announced at the 2009 Austin Game Developers Conference, held this September in Texas.
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Posted on June 15th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Back in 1993, Relic Entertainment released the source code to Homeworld, their 1999 3d space RTS blockbuster hit. Developers at Homeworld SDL have been porting the original code over to SDL so that the game can be played on Mac and Linux.
The Macintosh version is currently incomplete, missing some major components such as sound and pre-rendered movie playback. However the game itself is otherwise quite playable.
The Mac OS X playable is at version 0.9alpha.
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Posted on June 9th, 2009 by Jake McArthur
If you are looking for an extensive index of articles on Cocoa programming, such a list has been graciously provided on the Hyperjeff Network. The articles are organized by category for convenience. Topics covered include Core Audio, OpenGL (ES), Core Animation, Networking and much more.
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Posted on June 5th, 2009 by Jake McArthur
libQGLViewer is a C++ library based on Qt that eases the creation of OpenGL 3D viewers.
It provides some of the typical 3D viewer functionalities, such as the possibility to move the camera using the mouse, which lacks in most of the other APIs. Other features include mouse manipulated frames, interpolated keyFrames, object selection, stereo display, screenshot saving and much more. It can be used by OpenGL beginners as well as to create complex applications, being fully customizable and easy to extend. Based on the Qt toolkit, it compiles on any architecture (Unix-Linux, Mac, Windows). Full reference documentation and many examples are provided. libQGLViewer does not display 3D scenes in various formats, but it can be the base for the coding of such a viewer.
libQGLViewer uses dual licensing: it is freely available under the terms of the GNU-GPL license for open source software development, while commercial applications can apply for a commercial license.
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Posted on June 4th, 2009 by Adam Fothergill
A Look Back at Macintosh 3D Software
Back in the days of Mac OS 8.5/9, my 3D application of choice was Strata Studio, the 3D program that gave us Myst. Looking for extra features and stability, I evaluated the state of 3D software for game asset creation. The games industry was heavily into the early versions of Max at that time, and programs such as Cinema 4D and NewTek’s LightWave appealed to me because of their Amiga roots. Maya was yet to appear in the industry as a mainstream application for developing 3D game art, yet when it did appear, it was a pretty massive impact with a lot of studios switching over. I settled on Maxon’s Cinema 4D and have been using the program for several years now. Most recently, for Strange Flavour’s iPhone games Flick Fishing and SlotZ Racer.
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Posted on June 4th, 2009 by Ivan Milles
BlitzGames has put together a nice website for anyone wanting to get into the business of developing games. Blitz Academy discusses job roles in game development and articles on every aspect of creating games, it serves as a perfect starting ground — touching upon many areas of many subjects, giving you a feel for what game development is like.
Posted on June 3rd, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
There’s many request in our community for iPhone game programming tutorials. Collin Ruffenach’s iCodeBlog is a great resource for learning to make games on the iPhone. He is currently on part 4 of his tutorials on creating a simple tennis game.
In this tutorial series, I will teach you about every aspect of developing an iPhone game. The game will include graphics, sounds, game mechanics, and even some simple computer AI.
Part 1 covers introduces the project along with Xcode. It provides comments on the game loop and other basic snippets. Next, Collin covers interaction, simple AI and game logic in Part 2. The ‘polish’ aspect of game development is introduced in Part 3 with the addition of a splash screen. What’s eye candy without sound? To answer that, Part 4 adds audio to the game.
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Posted on June 2nd, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
The Coffee Desk, a blog aimed at providing stories on various tech subjects, has a post on Cider, a series of libraries which game developers can link to so that porting to the Mac is quicker. His provides his view on this product by Transgaming along with suggestions to developers to “…remake the game for the Mac, since you’re going to make a console version that relies on OpenGL anyway…” He cites Aspyr ports of AAA games, spotlighting their work on Guitar Hero.
For now Transgaming you get a 3/5 and a hand shake for putting more games on the Mac but not quite doing it the right way
Interested in porting to or from the Mac platform? Comment in Forum : Porting Games.
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Posted on June 1st, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Izatt International has announced a new evening format iPhone Developers Course to be held June 23-27, 2009 at the Larry H. Miller (SLCC) Campus in Sandy, UT. Class will be 6-9:30pm Tue-Fri, June 23-26, plus 8:30-5:30pm Saturday, June 27th. This new evening format is designed to serve the working professional without requiring time off work. Izatt has been offering such courses since January 2009. These courses have included a 3-day iPhone SDK course, a 2-day 3D iPhone Gaming course, and a 1-day Beginning Objective-C course. Many former students now have apps of their own in the iTunes App Store, have started companies of their own, or have found new employment doing iPhone development.
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