1) OpenGLES (hand-coding)
2) cocos3d
3) GLKit
4) SceneKit
5) Adobe Flash and Flash Develop (cartoony 2.5D feel as in "Kingdom Rush")
6) Box2D


I've started tinkering with iPhone programming, and wonder if any other povvers
have experimented with the 3D systems available for iOS.  I myself am very
fluent in making complex scenes (don't laugh!!) in povray, but have no formal
OpenGL or object-oriented programming language. I've done a bit of reading on
the various systems out there and wondering which of these would have the
shortest learning curve to it from povray?


I don't care about the "Objective-C" learning curve as much as I do the loss of
"povray common sense", or the stability of the platform.  One of them (SceneKit/
GLKit) was mentioned in a WWDC talk where the creator implied he'd make it
available 'till he got bored with it.

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On 24/10/2012 7:46 PM, gregjohn wrote:
> where the creator implied he'd make it
> available 'till he got bored with it.

There's honesty for you. :-)

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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gregjohn <pte### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> I've started tinkering with iPhone programming, and wonder if any other povvers
> have experimented with the 3D systems available for iOS.  I myself am very
> fluent in making complex scenes (don't laugh!!) in povray, but have no formal
> OpenGL or object-oriented programming language. I've done a bit of reading on
> the various systems out there and wondering which of these would have the
> shortest learning curve to it from povray?

Well, if all you care is making a 3D game, you should check Unity.

http://unity3d.com/

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> gregjohn <pte### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> > I've started tinkering with iPhone programming, and wonder if any other povvers
> > have experimented with the 3D systems available for iOS.  I myself am very
> > fluent in making complex scenes (don't laugh!!) in povray, but have no formal
> > OpenGL or object-oriented programming language. I've done a bit of reading on
> > the various systems out there and wondering which of these would have the
> > shortest learning curve to it from povray?
>
> Well, if all you care is making a 3D game, you should check Unity.
>
> http://unity3d.com/
>
> --
>                                                           - Warp


Hmm, wow, to do it right in that path, a Unity pro package + iOS, is $3k. I
spent a little extra cash on a MacBook and wanted to dive into iOS game
programming. And it's interesting that the game dev environments seem to diverge
so greatly in cost/stability.  On one hand is a $3k option, which almost makes
me feel like an investor (if I had the money), not a hobbyist.   On the other
are environments that seem to be one guy's favor to the world, with no promise
of it staying available, or being worth the learning curve.

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.

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?

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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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Btw, there are two possible approaches at making a 2D game for the iPhone.
On is trying to use the Cocoa library for everything, the other is using
OpenGL ES (although, as said, you seldom want to use it directly, and
instead you want to use a game engine that works on top of it.)

Trying to do it with Cocoa may at first seem easy, but you'll quickly find
out its limitations. It's quite inefficient at drawing tons of graphics,
and there are severe limitations on what you can do (for example you can't
place sprites at sub-pixel positions.) The inefficiency is the major problem.
Just one single particle effect could be too much for it to handle.

With OpenGL ES you practically don't need to concern yourself with
efficiency. You could have a hundred particle effects with a total of
tens of thousands of particles on screen at the same time, and you may
well get a good 60 FPS framerate.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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