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3D Engines on iPhone / iPod

Published by Matthias Gall

I recently evaluated the 3D engines available on iPhone. This is the list that I compiled, plus some commentary.

  • iTorque (commercial) is the well-known Torque game engine available for iPhone. It comes in three flavours (2D, 3D, Studio) and professional and indie license, although indie is not yet available (scheduled for October 15th). Since Torque is quite popular, seems to be well documented, has a huge community and several products using it have shipped, this would be a good bet, but from my point of view, it’s overpriced.
  • SIO2 (free) is a game engine with a bunch of cool features like physics and scripting, plus a sophisticated tool-chain around Blender. Here’s a YouTube video showing the engine in action. The only thing I don’t like about it is that so few people seem to be using it and that you need to display an 10 seconds video when using it – I’d prefer to add them to the credits.
  • Oolong Engine (free) is an engine written by Wolfgang Engels, one of the computer graphics gurus around, if you ask me. It makes heavy use of PowerVR formats and brought Bullet physics to the iPhone. Unfortunately, besides some examples and a mailing list, there’s barely any documentation available.
  • Unity3D (commercial) is a huge, fully-featured 3D game engine which was announced to be coming to the iPhone in March 2008. Unfortunately, there’s not a single sign of it yet.
  • Shiva (commercial) doesn’t seem to be an engine but more an authoring tool, but I list it for sake of completeness.
  • Living Arcana (free) is a project which features an iPhone port of an existing 3D engine which will be available under LGPL. Unfortunately I didn’t find this port.
  • Rumor has it that Irrlicht comes to the iPhone but I cannot confirm that yet.

Needless to say, I’d go for Irrlicht once it’s available. Still, I’m interested in your experiences. Which engine do you use?

digitalbreed framework

Published by Matthias Gall

I am getting dumb of writing the same code over and over, so I am finally in the process of setting up a C++ framework with core functionality I use in almost every project: macros (e.g. assertions), helper functions (e.g. pattern matching), serialization, virtual file system, XML support,… Some of the stuff is extracted from what I wrote for DVW, the VFS and XML stuff in particular.
I am thinking about writing more articles on this, like I did for the serialization part. Let me know whether you’d like to read more so that I can estimate whether it’s worth the effort. I would start with the VFS and head over to XML support.

A bugfixed Bookmarks Displayer Widget

Published by Matthias Gall

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1 today due to some major security issues (German link) and was reminded that one of my widgets was not working correctly. Nathan Oliphant wrote this widget to display bookmarks in the sort order of the users choosing. Unfortunately, it had two minor bugs which 1. caused changes not to be made persistent correctly with recent WordPress versions and 2. broke proper sort order selection. I fixed those bugs and added optional support for Ozh’s Click Counter plugin.
Again, here’s a direct link for your convenience, tested with WordPress 2.5.1:
Nathan Oliphants Bookmarks Displayer Widget (rename to .PHP after downloading)

MyBB Registration eMail Check

Published by Matthias Gall

Today, I wrote a simple MyBB plugin, Registration eMail Check (RMC). The plugin first verifies whether the email has a valid format, then compares the email host with a number of hosts which were explicitly disabled by the administrator (the plugin comes with a decent list of well-known one-time address providers), and finally tries to communicate with the corresponding mail server in order to verify whether the address actually exists.
I wrote the plugin for two reasons: First, because I wanted to prevent automated bot registration with non-existing email addresses. When I look through lists of users waiting for activation I find an ever growing amount of accounts which were obviously generated automatically, using non-existing email addresses. Second, because I don’t want people to use anonymous one-time email addresses when registering in forums where a certain mutual trust is mandatory.
Here’s version 1.0 for your convenience, tested with MyBB version 1.2.12:
RMC – Registration eMail Check 1.0 for MyBB
The source code is now available on GitHub.

Internet Fraud

Published by Matthias Gall

I saw the following advertisement on AutoScout24 today.
Too good to be true - Fraud on the Internet
5300 EUR for a 2007 Audi A3 ragtop. This looked too good to be true, indeed, but still I couldn’t hesitate to contact the seller. The telephone number shown in the ad turned out to be a fax number, so I tried to get in touch by email. I received a reply about 15 minutes later.
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