not that slayer's not venting uncontrollably or anything, but seriously, i understand why. i myself got licenses to torque and TGEA a while back and the support is literally non-existant. their engine is as stable as the wild west. their documentation doesn't exist. the support from the community is really just a bunch of guys asking for help with no one who know what they're doing. you have to go buy a book or two and go through them to even get started. no, the "documentation" does NOT give you anything useful. they've produced some incredible tech demos, but they refuse to answer the hard questions. as far as i'm concerned, garage games can keep my money as a notch on their belt if they so desire. but, they won't win anything else from me. as far as the new management is concerned, i really don't know anything about them. just be smart with your money and look to see who is open and that will likely give you a better idea of who's honest with their customers and potential customers.
man...looks like i posted without seeing how long the thread was!
Last edited by wahness; 04-03-2010 at 06:04 PM.
Reason: just wanted to comment about my bad timing
I code directly on xCode. May be a bit old fashioned
No, just inexperienced
Over the years I have written more low level code (in assembler even) used in device drivers, video games, and even 3d ray tracers. There is a time for that, you need to be smart in how you use your time. If something is going to save you time, you use it, it is completely pointless to develop your own 3D engine for mobile platforms when you would be far more productive staying focused on the game itself, and not how to cull a group of 3D polygons.
If you want to be old fashioned, follow these steps and develop like we did back then:
1) Unplug computer from the internet, all you can use is a modem and all you can connect to are BBS's, and Usenet. There is no "web" and no "cut and paste" programming.
2) Fire up an assembler for all low level code. You cannot use OpenGL, it doesn't exist, you need to talk directly to the hardware with your own code. This includes bank switching the video cards, each of which has its own funky API.
3) For higher level code, install GCC and remove all IDE's. We work from a dos prompt, no window environment (so uninstall X, Windows, or whatever windowing layer you use, they don't exist).
4) Destroy all your books and break out textbook math, there are no "write a 3D FPS in 24 hours" books.
5) There is no sound API, you hit the hardware directly.
See what I mean? Been there, done that, in the real world we don't work like that anymore.
PS: I am just teasing you! But honestly, if you want Old School, remove XCode and IB IDE's, you need to work only from the prompt. Also remove OpenAL, OpenGL, or any library for graphics or sound, they don't exist, you are rolling your own or calling only Core Graphics That is old school, so long as you dont use the WEB at all, go to a user group meeting and talk to other programmers face to face, or use your modem and connect o Compuserve hehe
Just in passing... do you think Unity and Torque will become "extinct" frameworks?
The recent changes to the iPhone Developer agreement prohibit third party development tools. People seem to be focusing on the upcoming Adobe Flash CS5 feature but obviously this will effect Unity, Torque and Titanium.
Just in passing... do you think Unity and Torque will become "extinct" frameworks?
The recent changes to the iPhone Developer agreement prohibit third party development tools. People seem to be focusing on the upcoming Adobe Flash CS5 feature but obviously this will effect Unity, Torque and Titanium.
Doesn't really matter to me since I can write C++ code and if I really need an engine use SIO2. This will mainly impact the people who use Unity because they can't program. It will be a shame to see it go, tools like Unity that is, but it will not impact me at all.
Doesn't really matter to me since I can write C++ code and if I really need an engine use SIO2. This will mainly impact the people who use Unity because they can't program. It will be a shame to see it go, tools like Unity that is, but it will not impact me at all.
Nor us, but I was just contemplating on the effect of "banning" such tools; potentially many applications might be pulled? I personally thing it's a good move by Apple since it means the iPhone can move forward with new features, rather than waiting for the frameworks to adapt the new SDK.
Hey all. Been a while since I posted...hope everyone's development is rockin'. In case someone missed it before:
FULL DISCLOSURE: I am the Associate Producer of iTorque.
I want to make sure I'm honest when writing, no sneaky posting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by iPhoneConnection
Just in passing... do you think Unity and Torque will become "extinct" frameworks?
The recent changes to the iPhone Developer agreement prohibit third party development tools. People seem to be focusing on the upcoming Adobe Flash CS5 feature but obviously this will effect Unity, Torque and Titanium.
This is the big discussion going around various development communities, especially on middleware sites. It looks like we (as in Torque, Unity, Shiva, etc) are all affected by this, but to varying degrees. I was contacted by Omaha at iGame Radio to provide our official stance. You can read the interview HERE.
I also posted the full e-mail exchange in our (now public) forums: Full Interview
As a few of you pointed out, if you develop in C++, C, or Objective C...you are pretty much in the clear. While you can use TorqueScript for development, here is a direct quote talking about our engine's capabilities:
“Our source engine, which is completely open to licensees, was written originally in C++,” Perry said. “We have a platform layer dedicated to the iPhone, which is completely written in Objective C. Both parts of the engine are bound to each other, with no intermediate layer. At any time a programmer can directly access native API calls from the iPhone SDK. You can not get anymore direct than that.”
We may or may not have to change parts of iTorque to comply, but we aren't hit as hard as some other iPhone engines. Anyway, back to work! Good luck with your game development =)
Nor us, but I was just contemplating on the effect of "banning" such tools; potentially many applications might be pulled? I personally thing it's a good move by Apple since it means the iPhone can move forward with new features, rather than waiting for the frameworks to adapt the new SDK.
Banning Unity, iTorque and GameSalad will not impact the majority of developers at all. They won't pull any apps, this will be for 4.0 and onward. But it does mean you might not be able to update old apps, dunno.
The only people who will be impacted by this are the artist type developer. They have little to no programming experience, and tools like Unity and iTorqe gave them the ability to compete with less programing experience. The fact that they can create, test and debug in these fancy drag and drop GUI's are the whole reason they purchased these engines in the first place. In other words they WANT drag and drop development and they DO NOT want to be dealing with C, C++ and OBjC at all. I feel bad for those guys, but they can always team up with a programmer (just like a programmer needs to team up with designers and artists). Source is available for both Unity and Torque, but I do not think it matters because if you need to delve into the source level, you may as well just roll your own OR use a FREE source API such as Cocos2d or SIO2 for 3D. And in the end, source does NOT help an artist, only helps the programmers.
Apple is making a mistake because many of the TOP titles are developed with Unity and Torque. Why knock those guys out? It will NOT have ANY impact on the crapware in the app store... those auto dialers, tit apps, fart apps, etc are not developed with Unity and Torque, they are developed with the SDK. So if anything, it will remove some of the better apps.
Apple is making a mistake because many of the TOP titles are developed with Unity and Torque. Why knock those guys out? It will NOT have ANY impact on the crapware in the app store... those auto dialers, tit apps, fart apps, etc are not developed with Unity and Torque, they are developed with the SDK. So if anything, it will remove some of the better apps.
I thought it was only available for PC, but it's now available for Mac/Xcode also!
I've just started using it for game dev and it's pretty sweet.
Apparently it's the same stuff used for COD:Zombies and Backbreaker on iPhone.
I used airplay for symbian. It used to be quite expensive, but looks like they reduced their price reciently. It's easily the best engine I've seen so far. The only downside is that it forces you to use fixed point math (at least it was like that when I was using it)
I code directly on xCode. May be a bit old fashioned
I think there are a number of benefits going this way but the main one is being able to tailor the engine to the game. This is not always necessary for every type of game though but I think graphic intenstive games will benefit the most. Another benefit is you learn more about the hardware and OpenGL API. Mastery over OpenGL is a great skill to have and is a much better skill than learning a 3rd party engine API IMHO.
Full Disclosure: I am the Associate Producer for iTorque
Hey everyone. So it's been a while since this thread first started, and a lot of development has gone into improving our iPhone engines. Despite the 3.3.1 controversy and past stigmas, our iTorque 2D development community has grown tremendously as the engine improves. I've pretty much avoided directly plugging the engine, just answering questions and correcting inaccuracies. Well, I can't contain myself and I'll use this thread rather than spamming the rest of the board:
Just yesterday we released the much anticipated iTorque 2D 1.4 Beta. The full details and features are available in our blog section. This is our most stable beta release yet, and offers a ton of iPhone OS integration and features (in addition to existing functionality that has made it so popular):
Robust UIKit Support (iPhoneUIExample)
Media Core support for movies and playing music from device library (iPhoneiPodExample)
GPS Location (iPhoneLocationExample)
Storekit Integration (iPhoneStoreKitExample)
Social networking "manager", which allows for easy integration of 3rd party tech like OpenFeint
New iDevice Settings section in editor, allows for toggling resolutions between iPhone, iPad, landscape, and portrait
New iDevice Feature Builder, allows you to pick and choose what OS Features you want enabled for your app: MultiTouch, Location, P2P networking, StoreKit, and so on
The engine team and myself are in the forums (which are open to the public) every day answering questions, fixing bugs, popping out the releases, and generally doing everything we can to empower developers. Well, back to work. I'll keep lurking in case anyone has more questions.
Airplay SDK
Linear Mode
