All posts filed under: Game Development

Crunch-time

Published by Matthias Gall

I didn’t talk to my girlfriend very much lately. I didn’t read many blogs. I didn’t watch any movies. I didn’t breathe much fresh air. I didn’t use my PC for anything more than listening to music or fetching mails. I didn’t sleep much more than four hours the last two weeks or so. I neither wrote a single line of code for DVW nor attended the last sechsta sinn team meeting. I have a new game on my desk right next to me but I didn’t even bother to install it yet. I get asked whether I’m sick because I look like a zombie when I creep around the office in the morning at noon. I currently drink so many energy drinks that my heart beats heavily when I finally try to get some sleep (so eventually I don’t get any). I’m sitting here with the MacBook Pro on my lap, big headphones with music on my head and two separate headphones in my ears, one connected to the MacBook and one to an …

iPhone NDA dropped

Published by Matthias Gall

Apple has dropped the iPhone NDA for released software. I guess now I need to release something really quick in order to be able to discuss iPhone development in detail and publically, right? So, you get what that actually means? It seems now that they cannot protect their stuff as much as they wanted, they at least want to make sure that people discussing the stuff have paid for the developer program first. As it seems, “released iPhone software” refers to the SDK itself, not released products in the AppStore. At least, this is what everyone else seems to think.

iPhone 3D engine test: SIO2

Published by Matthias Gall

Yesterday, I digged deeper into the SIO2 3D engine which I mentioned in my last post. This is what I’ve thrown together in some hours of work. (Featuring a free model by Sven Daennart, one of my favorite 3D artists.) The SIO2 API is very OpenGL-ish and features a bunch of C methods like “sio2ResourceGet”. It requires you to have one global attribute sio2 around which is the entry point into the engines internals, like the SIO2 window. (This is the point where it gets a bit annoying since every SIO2-related pointer in there starts with _SIO2… Hold on, I’m already using this sio2 global which you’re expecting me to have, so why do I need to type something like sio2->_SIO2window->_SIO2windowrender…?) I prefer an object-oriented approach anyway, so I started to wrap the engine into my own C++ classes which went pretty smooth so far. Fortunately, SIO2 comes with eight examples, each accompanied by YouTube video tutorials, and a skeleton project you can use for a jump-start. Moreover, a good part of the examples is …

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 …

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.