I am wondering if anyone knows of a open source or paid Xcode template.
It would be for a basic game, ( NOT COCOS2d ).
It would include simple items like profile management, load/save, Menu, Settings,
( perhaps include Openfeint/Game Center )
Something to use as a base for creating new games, things that get used over and over.
I am thinking about creating either a simple match three game, or maybe a card game.
Before I sat down and created one myself, I thought I would check to see if something
was available. ( No need to recreate the wheel right? )
Thanks everyone!
This isn't quite the solution you're looking for as it's not a game template, but it's worth checking out Sparrow - it's an open-source Objective C library so you don't need to learn anything new (unlike COCOS2D) and there's a nice Beginners Action Game tutorial you can follow.
Cheers..
If you don't want to use Cocos2D I guess you are thinking of 3D i.e. OpenGL ES games. If so, have a look at former question Alternative of Unity & SIO2. Maybe this is what you are looking for, but you should take SIO2 and Unity3D themselves into consideration. Especially Unity3D (I am just evaluating it the last 2 weeks) will save you a lot of work. SIO2 is a library using Blender for design and ships with customized exporter. It was open source since V1.4 but then they "convert" it into commercial software. What a pitty that the 1.4 source code is still not available at the according SF project.
There are two more engines: Unreal 3 Engine and Torque. I failed to find the pricing for Unreal now, but it might be something about 25% of your revenue or so. Torque stopped selling their 3D engine on iPhone and is now available in 2D only.
PS: Even for simple games I recommend using some kind of game engine, it will save you a lot of work compared to native XCode hacking.
You can use this template which is a well researched one available in the market.
http://www.binpress.com/app/ios-boilerplate-and-template/1597
Related
I just started C++ lessons not so long ago because I am interested in game development. Obviously I am nowhere near creating my own game yet but I was reading some guides on game development and it was talking about Unity and how it makes game development a lot easier than having to code 100% of the game.
However, I also watched some tutorials on youtube regarding SFML which can also be used for game developing, what are the differences? and can you use both at the same time?
I have already started learning about SFML but Unity seems so much simpler to use.
Thanks in advance.
In theory yes, but it's not practical, so the real answer is no.
SFML provides access to basic APIs (OpenGL, OpenAL, OS APIs, FreeType 2, etc) which can be used to build complex applications on top, for example like an engine more in the direction of Unity (e.g. xygine, Nero Game Engine).
But since Unity already provides access to all the things SFML would provide, there's really no reason in trying to integrate SFML into Unity. Similar to how it wouldn't make sense to integrate the Unreal Engine into Unity.
If you really want to do it, you'd approach it similar to how #Programmer described it in the comments.
I am searching for open source free API just like Unity or SIO2 which I can use for commercial purpose. Kindly tell me if there is any API for iPhone 3D games.
AFAIK there are two open source game engines:
irrlicht
oolongengine
I don't know much about irrlicht, but there are some dicussions about it here on stackoverflow.com. I think they support iPhone development for quite a while. oolong seems to have a hard learning curve because there is not much documentation and you have to subscribe to a good old mailing list.
If you are an Indie developer with less than 100k $ / year, Bork 3D engine might be worth to look at - you just have to pay $49. There is one drawback in that you don't have support for blender and you should have to check whether collada files are useful, if you don't use a commercial 3D modelling tool.
Just found this in my bookmarks :-) It's a bit out of date but a good place to start investigations:
iPhone Game Engine Comparison – Open Source
UNREAL
also you can use Unreal game engine which will you help al ot in making high graphics games for iphone.
Being a paid SIO2 user (Android) - My opinion of SIO2 is that the registration scheme on Android is TERRIBLE.
I've had to move on to another product.
The author of SIO2 seems to feel that answering customer questions is beneath him and gives answers in riddle form, as opposed to d
I want to develop a game in a month by using the Cocos2D Open Source game engine. Learning Cocos2D is a bit hard and I don't know how to create my initial project by using the files provided by Cocos2D base project. I doubt whether it is possible?
Can I learn by using Cocos2D base project directly and modify it for my game application? Does the license allow me to use like that? ( Because I can't learn all OpenGL programming concepts and develop an application in a month, which is very hard. )
Appreciate your thoughts and advice.
Thank you.
, I have been programming games for iPhone for more than a year now! I started doing most of the things in Objective-C but then I learned that for most graphically ( or computation ) intensive games, Objective-C is not really the best option. There are a lot of paths like Pure Objective-C for logic, and inline C functions for the more "intensive" parts of your game, Obj-C does also let you use C++ files ( for the model classes for example ) with Obj-C++ (which is basically a .m Obj-c source code file but renamed to .mm for Obj-c++ ).
Having said that, Cocos-2D is in my opinion a wonderful library, it's mostly written in Obj-C but has pure C parts for the most CPU intensive stuff (physics it's chipmunk physics and Box2D, they also have a hash table library written in pure C to avoid calling NSDictionary a lot). Cocos2D is not hard to use, and you can get a nice game working quite fast!
You can embed the whole Cocos-2D to a project of yours, or just embed some useful parts of it (like Cocos-Live for On-Line scores, the Texture loaders, etc). You could also start working directly from the Cocos-2D Xcode project and remove what you don't need (like examples etc).
For a simple explanation of the Cocos-2D license , read Here !
About OpenGL, with Cocos you won't need to learn it deeply, unless you start getting into very custom stuff.
Having said all that, here are my recommendations :
1) GUI takes time, GUI can take a lot (even more than 50%) of your source code actually... so take that into consideration if you are going to have game menus, etc.. and adjust your time schedules to make the GUI coding fit!
2) When you have learned Cocos a bit, start playing with OpenGL, it's a wonderful ride, and it's really great to know a bit about the "Engine" of your "Car" so if your "Car" (Cocos2D) break's or doesn't do exactly what you want, you can always tweak here and there to make it work.
For what it's worth, I tried to pick up Objective C a few times over the last year but gave up pretty quickly each time (though I used to do C a lot in the early 90s). Just over a week ago, though, I watched some screencasts and eventually decided to start making my own game. I then discovered and gravitated toward using Cocos2D.
Now, 9 days later, I have a prototype of a game done (it's a kinda clone of Robotron 2084). It's been great fun doing it so far and while this is not the most up to date version (this was at the 1 week mark), this video will give you an idea of what I've achieved: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzD6va1GiTI
I started by using the default Cocos2D project and just figuring it out and adding stuff as I went. I did a TON of Googling and often ended up here on Stack Overflow and on the Cocos2D iPhone forums (which are VERY useful). I've scratched my head a lot but it's been a fun experience (except for tracking down memory leaks ;-)).
Cocos2D is, I believe, LGPL licensed but has some extra clauses tagged on to make it even more free so you can use it in your iPhone game projects commercially or not without any problems.
I've found you don't need to learn much about OpenGL. I've copied and pasted some free snippets from here and there but they've been simple to figure out. Things like drawing lines and boxes, etc. I haven't learnt any "hard" OpenGL stuff. I've just stumbled and got a pretty long way, IMHO. I now feel pretty confident and am still finishing off this game to get it on the App Store and want to develop more!
Make sure to start with the latest Cocos2D 0.99-rc because they changed a lot of names and it'll annoy you if you have to upgrade in future. It's very stable and works fine. Go to http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/download and download it, unpack, then run the template installer. Then create a project using the Cocos2D template in XCode and Build & Run it on the iPhone Simulator. You'll get a basic example that you can then dig around in. Read the Cocos2D iPhone "Programming Guide" on their site too and gradually figure out how to change the scene to do something you want it to do. Small steps, etc :-)
If you have programmed games before AND you have some experience with Objective-C THEN you could develop a game in a month. The complexity of the game is a big factor.
I think Cocos2d is a very good framework to help you get started in 2D game programming for the iPhone.
Here is a very nice tutorial that will get you started: link text
I'm trying to pick between the Oolong and SIO2 iPhone game engines for my first game programming project. I have some Cocoa experience and many years of C++ including relatively low level 2D graphics and developing Quicktime plugins but only minor OpenGL exposure. Which engine would be easiest to learn and most productive for someone with my background and limited time?
Both include the Bullet physics engine. I lean towards Oolong because of its C++ source and optimisation for the PowerVR graphics. However, the Lua interpreter and additional sound goodies in SIO2 are appealing. SIO2 also seems to have a good range of tutorials.
I'm also willing to spend money on Unity or Torque Game Environment if they will save me significant time. The pricing gets interesting though - the Unity Indie license only applies to companies with turnover (not revenue!) of under USD 100,000 so you're easily out of that category and up for USD 3,000 per seat. I'd want a lot of convincing it will save time to justify that investment over just using SIO2! The Torque 3D product doesn't seem to be released yet but looks like costing about USD 500 on top of a USD 150 Indie license (their income threshold is USD 250,000).
**Edit Dec 2011 - SIO2 is no longer free **
I started my first SIO2 app last night and it was easy to get up & running from the tutorials (the tutorials include a full XCode project that you can load and start hacking on). The tutorial projects are also very well commented - this makes it quicker to pick up.
The interfaces to SIO2 are mostly in C, so your C++ background should make that transition pretty easy.
Even if you don't use it, download SIO2 and open one of the tutorials and check out the comments & code. You'll be able to tell pretty quickly if it's a toolkit & style you like.
Not directly related to speed of uptake, but a big plus for me was the Blender integration. It lets me use a free 3d toolkit to make & export models and then go from there. I saw that Oolong uses 3DS and I'm not sure if Blender exports that format or not so I could be wrong.
If you're curious: SIO2 provides a python script that exports the Blender scene to a zip file. Then, from inside the SIO2 code you reference your objects from the scene and pull them in to your iPhone app.
I try both OOLong and Unity way. I suggest to use unity:
Learn Curve is very short if you have a basic game background
Unity include a large set of utility outer of 'graphics & audio'
With unity you don't care about graphics/audio file format
One code for both iOs and Android
Full set of pre-assembled asset free from the store
Exendible editor to make your level-editor
I spend one year to close a OOLong project. I probably would have saved six months of work with unity.
I'm not a graphics or game designer but would like to build more interactivity into my iPhone apps and eventually start developing gaming apps. Tools such as Blender seem for out into the future for anything I'll produce useful from them. I need something similar to a FrontPage for game developers. For 300 bucks, Torgue for the iPhone seems like a nice all in one package: http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3D. Has anyone used this or something similar and can comment about how good it is?
One of the coolest end-to-end solutions that I've seen to date is Unity3D, which now allows you to publish your game directly as an iPhone application. It's not exactly cheap, but you can get an indie license for $598. There's good support and plenty of community examples and stuff to get you going.
Torque and Blender aren't really comparable: Torque is primarily a game engine and Blender is primarily a 3D modelling application. You'd use the latter to create content for the former.