iDevGames

Autodesk today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Alias, a privately held developer of 3D graphics technology, for $182 million in cash. This acquisition will grow Autodesk’s expertise and offerings in the film and video, interactive games, media, Web, consumer products, industrial design, automotive, architecture and visualization markets. Autodesk anticipates that the transaction will close within the next four to six months.

Could this lead to 3ds Max being ported to the Mac?

Autodesk

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?id=5970886&siteID=123112

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OGRE 3D is a cross-platform (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux), object oriented graphics display API released under the LGPL. It supports both Direct3D and OpenGL, as well as shaders and many different model importers. It has bindings for, among others, C++, Java, Python, and C#. This looks to be a mature, full-featured 3D API which may be of interest to developers here.

OGRE 3D

http://www.ogre3d.org

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Description courtesy of Wikipedia

sdlBasic is a dialect of the BASIC programming language. It is implemented by an Italian programmer using GPL code. The core interpreter is the same as in wxBasic. Instead of the wxWidgets GUI kit the multi-platform multimedia SDL library was added. It comes with fairly elaborate examples how to implement games. Noteworthy is a Sokoban game written in 19kB of Basic code which is relatively easy to understand.

sdlBasic seems like a decent free replacement for Metal. Perhaps some developers here would be able to assist in making this more Mac-friendly (particularly the install procedure.)

sdlBasic Source Code

http://sdlbasic.sf.net/flatnuke/cvstarballs/cvs-sdlbasic.tar.gz

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Crazy Eddie’s GUI System is a free library providing windowing and widgets for graphics APIs / engines where such functionality is not natively available, or severely lacking. The library is object orientated, written in C++, and targeted at games developers who should be spending their time creating great games, not building GUI sub-systems!

Crazy Eddie’s GUI System

http://www.cegui.org.uk/

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JUCE (Jules’ Utility Class Extensions) is an all-encompassing C++ class library for developing cross-platform applications.

It’s particularly good for creating highly-specialised user interfaces and for handling graphics and sound. The intended users are developers, who are writing large, complex applications in C++ and who would like to use just one clean, high-level API rather than a bunch of different libraries for different purposes or platforms.

JUCE is released under the GNU Public License, and costs nothing to use in open-source applications.

A few of JUCE’s features:

• Basics—World’s best string class; arrays; stream and file handling; time and date; maths functions, random numbers, reference counting, super-fast XML parser and well-stocked XML manipulation classes; abstractions for threads, processes, critical sections etc; built-in GZIP compression/decompression streams and ZIP file reading; undo/redo support; logging; messaging layer with timers, event listeners; etc. etc.
• User Interface—Cross-platform windowing capability with extremely powerful lightweight component architecture. Ready-made components include buttons, lists, menus, textboxes, treeviews, scroll-bars, etc. Components are customizable either at a low-level by creating your own (or by subclassing existing ones), or at an application-wide level by creating custom look-and-feel styles for them.
• Vector Graphics—Fast, high-quality anti-aliased rendering of shapes with transparency, gradient fills, etc; path stroking with different line styles, dashed-lines; affine transformations and geometry classes; manipulation of typefaces as paths and custom font engine to provide sub-pixel accurate text in a platform-independent manner; typefaces can be serialized for easy embedding of fonts in an executable.
• Image manipulation—High-quality rendering of images, allowing affine transformations and transparency; support for cross-platform OpenGL windows within Juce windows; built-in parser for loading JPEG, PNG and GIF image formats; image caching; easy embedding of images in an executable without having to use platform-specific resources.
• Audio—Low-latency audio engine supporting DirectSound, ASIO and CoreAudio devices; audio buffer classes for mixing and manipulating samples; Parsers for WAV and AIFF formats, as well as reading audio streams from audio CD devices (easy on the Mac, but tricky on Windows!); powerful MIDI message classes; MIDI file load/save; connectable audio-processing nodes including sample-rate conversion.
• Networking—URL handling; http and ftp reader streams; launching default browsers, etc.
• Easy to integrate-JUCE is a static library so your application can run as a stand-alone executableno extra dlls to install, nothing for users to mess up! In your application, you’ll just need to include one header file: “juce.h” and that’s it-no platform-specific code or any other headers needed.

• Raw Material Software Ltd

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G3D is an impressive open source (BSD License) cross-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux, OpenGL, DirectX, etc.) 3D game engine. Rather than commandeering complete control over your program as many IDE inspired game engines do, G3D is implemented as a C++ library with most fundamental 3D functions and structs ready for your use on any platform, no code changes required. Features include collision detection, physics, input, camera movement, model animation, and texture loading. See the site for more details.

G3D 3D Game Engine

http://g3d-cpp.sourceforge.net

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Transcend, a cross-platform game, can best be described as retro-style, abstract, 2D shooter. The graphics are geometrical, and the pace is sometimes frenzied. Two features set Transcend apart from other games. First, its dynamic graphical engine (based on OpenGL), which can smoothly morph from one complex shape to another, produces striking displays. Combining these dynamic shapes with subtle randomizations makes each play through a Transcend level visually different from the last. The second novel feature is Transcend’s musical power-up system. As you play through a level, you are simultaneously assembling an abstract visual collage and arranging a unique piece of music. Transcend merges video games with pure art—it can be viewed either as a game or as a multimedia sculpture. The Unix source code is also available, and requires the GLUT development library.

Transcend

http://transcend.sourceforge.net/

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REAL Software Introduces REALbasic Forums, a New Online Community for REALbasic

REAL Software, Inc., providers of REALbasic, cross-platform that really works, announced today the launch of REALbasic Forums. REALbasic Forums is a REAL Software-sponsored and hosted community for REALbasic users. REALbasic Forums is an ideal venue for both experts and those new to REALbasic, and even those new to software programming, to share information about REALbasic.

REALbasic Forums is not intended to replace the REALbasic NUG, a popular mailing list for REALbasic users that generates over 9 million messages per month. Users have expressed different requirements, some prefer mailing lists, while others prefer a forum or message board environment. REALbasic users around the internet expressed their enthusiasm for the new forum with comments such as, “a REALbasic forum is something that is greatly needed and will be much appreciated by the REALbasic community!” REALbasic Forums is a moderated online community. While anyone can read posts and comments online, contributors will need to create an account to be able to post messages or comments. Once an account is created, private messages and contact information such as email or instant-messaging (IM) addresses can be shared among members. REALbasic is a full-featured software design environment easily suited to creating all kinds of applications, from utilities to enterprise-class applications. REALbasic is available now starting at $99.95 direct from REAL Software. REALbasic Professional Edition, required for cross-platform compilation, starts at $399.95 and includes extended functionality for database and team development. Download a free trial of REALbasic at http://www.realsoftware.com/demo.

REAL Software

http://www.realsoftware.com/

REALbasic Forums

http://forums.realbasic.com

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DreamSpace has notified iDevGames that they are bringing their 360 Game Creator to Mac OS X. This reasonably priced 3D game engine has a number of demonstration games available on the Dreamspaced website, but unfortunately they are all for Windows at the moment. Let the company know you’re interested in their $40 game engine to move the Mac OS X port along quicker.

• Dreamspaced——-

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Alice is a 3D authoring system from Carnegie Mellon University geared towards teaching programming to children.

Alice address both the mechanical and sociological barriers that currently prevent many students from successfully learning to program a computer. Alice addresses the mechanical barriers to programming by making it much easier for students to create programs. Rather than having to correctly type commands according to obscure rules of syntax, students drag-and-drop words in a direct manipulation interface. This user interface ensures that programs are always well-formed. In addition, Alice reifies object-based programming by providing animated, on-screen 3D virtual objects.

Alice comes with hundreds of pre-made objects, and you can also make your own objects in other modeling packages and then import them into Alice. The package is released as open source and the source is included in the install of Alice.

Alice.org

http://www.alice.org/

Download for OS X (136 MB)

http://www.alice.org/downloads/authoringtool/mac/Alice-2.0.5.dmg

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