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What is the blog etiquette?

Published October 03, 2008
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So what is the proper way to respond to a blog comment? Do you comment on your own blog, email the comment-er, or make a new post?

Eh, I'll do the last. A couple of posts ago, Bryan offered to test the waters for me regarding the iPhone development. And I'm always up for that.

If you (you being Bryan, everyone else is eavesdropping) want existing source code, you can have it. I don't, though, know what good it'll do. All the source is in C++ (the Retro Pack) or ActionScript (the new games), and I don't think they have enough in common with Objective C to make it good for anything other than a ground-up rewrite. At least that was the case with my games. Apart from reading code to remember how I did things, I didn't end up moving over any code when I rewrote some of my C++ games in ActionScript (Voracity, Shi Sen, Bulldozer).

As for the games, why don't you (again you being Bryan) start off with your own games? I think Lasso and Evolve would be a natural for the iPhone, especially if you could move the lasso around with the tilt-sensor. Also when you're done with 'em, we don't have to split the revenue. Slap Lasso up on the Apple iPhone store and start making the big bucks.

Unless you have some kind of agreement with your employer. Then I suppose we can label Lasso as a Code Zone game, although I do intend to give you the lion's share of the proceeds on that.
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Comments

MauMan
My mistake; I thought you are thinking about porting (at the code level) your old games. If that was the case since the mac supports mixing C++ and Objective C I was going to take a quick stab at re-implementing the parts of StarView for the core parts logic/drawing. The UI should be easy to redo given IB. That's why I wanted the simplest game to see if it was feasible or a nightmare.

As for my games who says I have not started re-writing them for the iPhone?
October 03, 2008 05:10 PM
johnhattan
Yeah, I thought about doing a StarView port (or at least enough of it to ease the port-pain). Unfortunately one of the most fundamental things StarView had was that resource model so you could define much of your UI (and fonts and colors and pens, etc) externally and then read it at runtime. And I looked at their resource database code and it's WAY non-trivial.

Probably too much work given that the actual game specific (not shared) code in each of my games is about 500-2000 lines.

Unfortunately it also looks like the OSX and iPhone UI objects are 102% incompatible with each other, so making an OSX game that'll work on iPhone and vice-versa without huge changes is not a good bet (contrasted with Windows CE, which is very similar to Win32). wxWidgets is a close cousin of StarView, but it's not close to supported on iPhone.

Best bet if you want portability is probably SDL. Dunno how good it is, but at least there are some youtube videos of it working.

C++ on iPhone definitely seems like a second-class citizen, but it's apparently do-able.
October 03, 2008 09:41 PM
ukdm
Have you considered porting to the Unity engine? Then you'd have iPhone, Mac, PC, browser and Wii versions from a single code base? At least then , if it is a lot of work, you are getting 5 releasable versions in return...

October 05, 2008 09:37 AM
johnhattan
Unity is intriguing, but it's gonna need Apple's blessing. As it stands, they mandate that you can't use runtime engines or even third-party libraries.

Heck, I'd just write the thing in Adobe AIR and wait for Adobe to catch up, but Apple still hasn't said if they'll bless the Flash player on it.
October 05, 2008 02:13 PM
ukdm
I believe Unity is already approved as an iPhone development platform and will be available to use from October 22. You do have to sign up to be an iPhone developer though, which costs you $100, plus you need an Indie Unity engine license - a further $199.

More info:
http://unity3d.com/unity/features/iphone-publishing
October 05, 2008 03:45 PM
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