iDevGames

Starting life as ZBasic, FutureBASIC has had a loyal following on the Mac since Chris Stasny took over under Staz Software. We’ve reviewed FutureBASIC in the past, and even received some entries into uDevGames made with this IDE. In August 2005, Staz Software was severely hit by Hurricane Katrina and with advancements in Mac OS X, FutureBASIC headed towards the way of CodeWarrior. Staz Software released FutureBASIC as freeware in 2008 but we haven’t heard much from the community until now — an independent team of FutureBASIC programmers developed a translator that allows FutureBASIC to generate applications as Universal Binaries through the use of the open source GCC compiler. The translator, FBtoC is available for download and is currently at version 1.4.1. FutureBASIC 5.4.1 is also available from this project’s site.

Related Links:

• FBtoC Project
• Staz Software
• TNT Basic

Ingemar Ragnemalm, best known for writing the Sprite Animation Toolkit (SAT) and the book ‘Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus’ has released a new Mac OS X IDE called Lightweight IDE.

Lightweight IDE was written after the observation that IDEs have gotten more and more complex, to the result that it is a problem. The IDE is not always a help, it is a burden.
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Work on the game then stalled for about a year—in fact, I didn’t write a line of code for the whole academic year. When I graduated in the summer of 2002, I decided that I should sit down and just write a whole game, and make sure I finished it whatever happened.

Amusingly, I failed in that task; after a couple of months I killed VolleyPong. It was, basically, boring to play. Nevertheless, the time wasn’t wasted—I learned a great deal from the experience.

However, uDevGames 2002 was starting and I wanted to enter something this year. While I was thinking, I thought I’d have a quick go on MAFFia, and I found it wouldn’t run at all on Mac OS X. I wanted to play the game, but I don’t like starting up in Classic. I knew it had the potential to be a fun game, and I thought I could probably make it live up to that potential in time for uDevGames 2002. With this in mind I decided to rewrite it for Mac OS X with Apple’s Project Builder. Thus, the single file in which all the code had previously lived was pinned down and roughly chopped into pieces, and I started to rebuild.
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