gregjohn <pte### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> I'm almost thinking of just taking my povray characters and making some sprites,
> and making games that way. I'm starting to learn how to make them move across
> the screen, and I already have that skill.

It's actually unclear to me if what you want is to make 3D OpenGL games or
2D sprite based games.

In general, you *don't* want to develop 3D games directly with OpenGL,
unless we are talking about extremely simple applications that demonstrate
one thing. Usually you want to use a game engine which has a full
development pipeline. Unity is one such thing (with the advantage that
it can export to much more than just the iPhone.)

OTOH if what you want is to make a 2D sprite based game, Unity is not the
tool for that. There exist, of course, also 2D game engines, some better
and some worse. The best ones allow you to create, for example, a simple
Angry Birds clone in just a few minutes (when you know how to use them and
have the graphics already done.) They tend to be non-free, though.

There are also 2D game engines that only provide you the libraries but no
graphical tools. Usually you have to find (or create) the tools yourself,
and code the logic of the game by hand. However, they still are much easier
to use than trying to use OpenGL ES directly for this. (Basically these
game engines are wrapper libraries around OpenGL ES to make it much easier
to write a 2D game.)

Cocos2d for the iPhone is one of the most popular ones. (It still doesn't
mean it won't take you some time to learn how to use it, even though it's
obviously much less learning than trying to use OpenGL ES directly.)

> Really stupid question: is a "sprite" game easier to hack than, say an OpenGLES
> game? In terms of someone with a jailbroken phone to be able to get your sprite
> sheets directly?

It doesn't depend on which library you use. It depends on how you store your
data. (Of course if you want to obfuscate your data so that it's harder to
read, you'll have to "decrypt" it when reading, before giving it to the
game engine. I'm not sure it's worth the trouble.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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