Posted on March 1st, 2010 by Carlos Camacho
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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Posted on February 25th, 2010 by Carlos Camacho
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.
Posted on February 24th, 2010 by Andy Korth
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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Posted on February 22nd, 2010 by Carlos Camacho
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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Posted on February 21st, 2010 by Carlos Camacho
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:
- Supports x86 versions: 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6. Uses Quartz, X11 and OpenGL as video backends and coreaudio.
- Support GNU C/C++ 4.x versions.
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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Posted on February 20th, 2010 by Justin Baldock
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
Posted on February 5th, 2010 by Carlos Camacho
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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Posted on February 3rd, 2010 by Carlos Camacho
Bukisa has an interesting tutorial series that steps you through the process of creating a 3D shoot’em’up game using the popular and powerful Ogre 3D engine.
Ogre is arguably one of the top free 3D engines available. It has been used as the basis of a number of successful commercial games, has a huge and active community, and includes a number of cutting edge features. In this tutorial series we will see how to create a simple shoot’em’up using the Ogre 3D engine. But before we can start making the game, we need to get some of the basics done, like initialise the Ogre engine and open a window on the screen.
Topics include, adding a player, populating a level, adding weapons, collision detection and more.
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Posted on February 1st, 2010 by Carlos Camacho
Cheetah3D 5.2 is now using WebKit-JavaScriptCore JavaScript engine which is also used by Safari. Due to the JIT compiler the execution of custom scripts should be considerably faster now. Cheetah3D will be ready for 64 bit in the near future (the 64bit version will be a free update for all 5.x users). Cheetah3D 5.2 also adds many work flow enhancements. From a texture preview in the properties editor over a file selector in the render manager to copy and paste support of animation keys in the timeline. Cheetah3D 5.2 will require at least Mac OS X 10.5.
Related Link: Download Cheetah3D
Posted on January 7th, 2010 by Carlos Camacho
We spotlight two articles that give insight into working in the game development industry today. Brian Green’s “Game development according to Cypress Hill” attempts to dispel some myths about game development.
The first reality is that there are a lot of people out there who want to do what you do. On a basic level, there are a lot of people eager to make games and most of them don’t realize that making games isn’t the same as playing games. For every burnout case in the industry, there are a number of fresh-faced kids wanting to get their chance at what they think is their dream job.
The post “The Life of a Washed-out Game Developer: The Good & The Bad” on MMO News features a former game developer. He speaks about the highs and lows of creating games.
Life as a game developer is great as long as you know what you’re getting into and are absolutely certain that this is what you want to do with your life.
The article is great reading for any student wishing to make games. The author writes…
Working on something that starts from very little or nothing, and watching it grow into a good game is just a fantastic experience. But, I also think that the game industry has, historically, never paid close attention to veterans and deserved proceeds. People leaving the industry after 5 years or so is relatively common.
Over the years, a few of our community members have moved from Indie development, or student development, into the industry — we’ve loved to hear your take on working fulltime as a game developer.
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