iDevGames

Independent game developer Josh Forde had started a blog on his attempt to learn 3D programming using the Irrlicht 3D Engine.

This will be my first major journey into 3D game programming, after a few small attempts to learn DirectX and OpenGL. Seeing as how Irrlicht is fairly easy to learn in comparison to DirectX and OpenGL, I have decided it is best for me to gain some experience in Irrlicht before making a serious attempt toward DirectX/OpenGL.

Although Josh is a PC developer, the Irrlicht Engine is available for Mac OS X, and his articles may be of interest to Mac developers curious about this open source engine.

Related Links:

• Starting 3D programming
• Irrlicht Engine

Written in pure C using OpenGL ES as the drawing API, as well as a bit of Obj-C & C++ to glue things together, SIO2 is a light and flexible 3D engine for the next generation of mobile devices. This current release includes everything required to get started:

• Realtime Rigid and Soft Body Physic ( Bullet )
• Realtime MP3 (.ogg) using OpenAL & MPEG4 playback (.ogv)
• World editor WYSIWYG ( Blender )
• Scripting language ( LUA )
• Python Exporter,
• Realtime Lighting & Particle System
• Accelerometer & multi-touch support as well as many other features…

It is build around the official iPhone SDK (2.0 and up) for Mac OS X. Video tutorials, code samples, documentations, forums etc, are available to help you create your own 3D applications for iPhone & iPod Touch. A video showing some of the features is available on YouTube.

Related Links:

• Main website
• YouTube Video

NeoEngine is a fully featured Open Source 3D game engine that you can use to power your own game creations. It is released under the GPL license, with options of acquiring commercial and support licenses. The engine is truly multiplatform, featuring OpenGL and DirectX rendering, with support for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It provides functionality for scene management, vertex and pixel shaders, skeletal animation and physics, scripting and a fully integrated tool chain. Released under an Open Source license, NeoEngine gives you full and direct access to the whole API and the source code implementation.

• Related link: NeoEngine

Just in time for uDevGames, this article covers using Git for Cocoa development. Git is an open source version control system designed to handle very large projects with speed and efficiency, but just as well suited for small personal repositories

I’m hoping that this post will act as a quick start guide for anyone who’s interested in using Git for their Cocoa development source control needs.

Download the OS X installer from Google Code and run through to get started with Git on your system.

• Related Link: Git for the Cocoa Developer: A Typical Workflow

With the kick-off of uDevGames 2008, it seems that game development contests are popular this month. Three Rings announced back on Dec 5th their inaugural Flash Game Developer Challenge for its player-created virtual world and Flash game development platform, Whirled. Flash developers who create games using the Whirled APIs can compete for $25,000 in cash prizes every three months. In addition to the Challenge, Three Rings also announced that all Flash game developers on Whirled are eligible for the Game Developer Bonus Bling Pool, a $10,000 monthly cash pool split daily among game developers in direct proportion to the number of gameplay minutes their game represents of the overall total on Whirled.
Read the rest of this entry »

Published in 2005, ‘The OpenGL Programming Guide’ (third edition), is a great guide for programmers using OpenGL graphics interface standard. Written by members of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board, this book offers understandable tutorials and lessons on getting up to speed and getting the most out of OpenGL, version 1.2. You can now download the electronic version of this text at the link below.

• Related Link: The OpenGL Programming Guide

The Mac Gamer has posted an interview with our editor, Carlos Camacho, about the uDevGames contest. Read the full interview at The Mac Gamer (and digg it).

LÖVE is an unquestionably awesome 2D game engine, which allows rapid game development and prototyping in Lua. This project is constantly evolving and changes come and go, sometimes initiated by us and sometimes by the recommendations of others. If you have an idea on how to make the game engine better, it is greatly desired that you contact us and let us know what you think.

• Get the Universal Binary
• Get the Docs

Rita is a paint program for Mac OS X that attempts to be limitless, flexible and easy to use. Unlike traditional paint programs Rita does not restrict you to a particular image size or resolution. Instead, it uses an infinite canvas. You can make the image as big as you like and zoom in as much as you want without ever encountering any big blocky pixels.

Related Link: Rita

What is Greenfoot? Consider greenfoot as a combination between a framework for creating two-dimensional grid assignments in Java and an integrated development environment (class browser, editor, compiler, execution, etc.) suitable for novice programmers. While greenfoot supports the full Java language, it is especially useful for programming exercises that has a visual element. In greenfoot object visualisation and object interaction are the key elements.