2009/09/01

iPhone game programming basics - recommended books

Hi kids,

This time I would like to write some basic info about programming. It's really important part of making a game and I have not pay much attention about it on my blog yet. So here is first try to change it. I'm not planning to put here lines of code or anything like that, because you can find many examples and tutorials on the internet. This will be just my impressions and what I've found interesting.

First of all I must correct few things. In one of my first post I wrote, that I don't feel like a big programmer and that's true – I don't. But to be honest I have some programming experience from the past. I was working in IT, wrote some small programs in C and C++ during 90s when I was employed at Masaryk University in Brno. But it's quite long time ago and Mac, XCode, ObjectC is completely new to me. Because of that I needed some help for the start, so I searched the web for some advices and found great book called Beginning iPhone Development by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche, which helped me a lot. Another interesting book by Dave Mark is iPhone Games Projects. You can find there many advices from successful game developers. I really recommend both of them to other beginning developers, but even if you are experienced you could find many useful information there.

Shortly after studying these books and all other great articles over the web, I found out that you don't need to write all your game in ObjectC (I must admit, I don't really like it - forgive me Apple). Actually it is possible to write most of your code in C++ and only basic routines like handling inputs and the main timer loop of the game in ObjectC. That was quite a relief for me! After that discovery it was quite clear for me to go that way and it pushed me forward a lot.

Last part of this article I would like to write little bit about game engines. From the beginning I was sure, that I'm not going to use any engines at all and write all by myself. So I started learning OpenGL ES which is subset of OpenGL. I knew little bit about OGL before. I really want to recommend excellent NeHe tutorials, that can help beginners with OGL really really lot. So because of my experience with classic OpenGL, it was not really hard for me to be friend with OpenGL ES (it's nearly the same).

But the hard part came with the physics. It really overwhelmed me and I must admit that I changed my mind about writing all by myself and decided to use some of the existing physics engine. So I searched, searched and finally found one, but you must wait for another article to learn more about the physics engine I decided for, because that’s enough for today.

3 komentáře:

  1. I was wondering how you were going to manage your physics after seeing one of your earlier sketches.

    If you're not familiar with Jeff LaMarche's blog, it's usually interesting: http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/

    I find Objective-C much more elegant than C++; it'll be interesting to see if you change your mind any as you become more familiar.

    -Bill Shirley, FlipSide5, Houston

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  2. The one thing I love about various programming books is what they choose for their cover art. You can bet your bottom dollar that if it's a game programming book, the cover art is going to have approximately nothing to do with game programming. What if other books did this? Ie, here the university physics series, with a series of Big Cats used for cover art. It would confuse the hell out of people. But then look at a collection of books by O'Reilly. It's like a F*** safari.

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  3. I just came upon your site and desired to say that I have really experienced reading your content. Any way I will be registering to your rss and I wish you publish again soon.
    Game Design

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