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 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 July 18th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
REAL Software is now shipping REALbasic and REAL Studio 2009 Release 3. This release boasts more than 100 improvements and 31 new features, including the addition of OpenGL support for 3D images and animation. REAL Software claimes that REALbasic should now be able to develop 3D applications 50% to 70% faster over those using traditional C-programming methods. The new OpenGLSurface control does require a knowledge of the OpenGL language. However, there are some open source projects that are implementing an RB3D-compatible API on top of the OpenGL for developers who currently use RB3D.
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Posted on July 2nd, 2009 by Alex Sikora
Clear Examples and Well-Choosen Images
Beginning iPhone Development advertises itself as “A complete course in iPhone and iPod touch programming” and I think it fulfills its promise. Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche have plenty of experience and it shows in this book. There aren’t very many iPhone books out yet, as Apple continues to release updates to its SDK, but this is the best one of the group. The book is easy to understand and covers all the topics a beginning iPhone developer would need to know. From clear examples to well-chosen example images, this book covers iPhone development well.
The book’s teaching method is very well made for beginners. While those new to programming in general may have minor issues, it’s not designed to teach the beginner programmer, but anyone who is trying to learn iPhone development will have an easy time with this book. It covers user interface design, accelerometer programming, Quartz and OpenGL drawing – the chapters follow each other in a logical order.
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Posted on May 27th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Rosetta Stone, the company known for their foreign language learning software, is sponsoring a game programming contest. The Contest begins on July 17, 2009, and ends on July 19, 2009. All applications to participate in the Contest must be received by Rosetta Stone no later than 5pm (Eastern Time) on July 1, 2009. This event will be held at Rosetta Stone’s location in Harrisonburg, VA from July 17th – 19th, 2009. You must apply by July 1st to be considered for the competition. The prizes are:
- 1st Prize: Macbook Pro with 30 inch cinema display, three levels of Rosetta Stone Software and your game published on a Rosetta Stone webpage
- 2nd Prize: $500 and three levels of Rosetta Stone Software.
Gamers must be or have a team with at least one programmer with game development programming experience using either Flash, XNA, OpenGL, PyGame, etc. You will be asked to provide an example of past creations of any form or level in order to qualify. Teams may include up to four members. All team members must be 18 years of age or over to participate, or be accompanied by a parent or legal guardian at all times during their participation.
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Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Justin Ficarrotta
Background Info
After growing up wanting only to make videogames, and making a few small games with Pascal and later Hypercard in grade school, I released my first game for the uDevGames contest in 2004, called Kill Dr. Coté. It won the award for Best Gameplay, was a fan favorite, went on to be published by Freeverse, and got me my first job in the industry as a programmer.
Since then, my output has been scarce. I quickly followed up with “Arachnoid: Predator of Worlds” in July 2005, but after that, working full time in the industry drained me and thwarted any progress on independent work. Several years passed, and during that time I first yearned for the energy to work on a project, and after that failed, I started to even doubt whether I would be capable of such a project and still keep myself fed. When I heard that uDevGames 2008 was starting, I figured it would be the best time to find out once and for all. While in 2004, my purpose was to prove my talent and ability to the world, this time around it would be to prove it to myself!
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Posted on April 13th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
NUI is a C++ application framework that runs on the iPhone, Mac OS X (Universal), Win32 and Linux. Its main distinctive features is its use of 3D hardware to render the UI via OpenGL, OpenGL Es and Direct3D. Features include:
- Low level abstraction: string, files, paths, streams, network, timers, threads, mutexes, etc.
- Widget layout engine
- Really many widgets: text, grids, boxes, collumn views, tree views, etc.
- Integrated widget tree visual introspection/debugging
- Web-like CSS engine
- Modern rendering and compositing engine
- Animations for widgets and their attributes
- Attributes to remote control widgets
- Audio IO and Audio file loading/saving (including compressed audio files decoding)
- Stable and proven lib: many applications have been released since 2001 with NUI at their core.
The lib is dual licensed under the GPL and commercial licensing for non-free software developers.
Posted on April 11th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Panda3D is free 3D Engine that can be used for any purpose, even commercial development. Panda3D has tutorials and an active support forum. Highlights of this engine include full Python integration, performance monitoring, depth & shadow textures, installers for multiplatforms, Cg shader language, sample programs, HDR rendering and Cel Shading. The Mac OS X one-step installer includes everything you need to get started with Panda3D: the engine, the python libraries, tons of utilities, and lots of sample programs. Currently, it requires Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) and the NVIDIA Cg Toolkit.
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Posted on April 6th, 2009 by Iain Bethune
Background
I seem to be spending more and more time on planes these days — often slowly taxiing around airports or waiting in a holding pattern to land! While idly staring out of the window I started thinking about what it must be like to be an air traffic controller, trying to get so many planes to land safely and quickly with only a limited number of runways and aircraft stands. Thus the idea of FIDRIS was born. Fast-forward several thousand years and you have a game where the object is to manage a space station, docking as many ships as you can given finite resources of time and space.
As one of the uDevGames voters commented “I’d say it was a creative risk to tackle the idea of this game”, and that’s definitely the case — at the start of the contest I just had this idea, but didn’t know if it would actually turn out to be ‘fun’ or not! What I did know was that it was a simple enough idea to be finished and polished within the three months I had available for the contest.
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