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Open Source Mac Game Programming Competition
Geert Poels writes "The uDevGame Mac Game Programming Contest was established by iDevGames in 2001 to energize game development on the Apple Macintosh platform. With the 2002 edition launched only two weeks ago, already 42 games have entered the competition. Most notable about this competition isn't the impressive collection of prizes worth $11,000 but rather the obligation for all participants to submit all source code. This kind of competition is groundbreaking for the Mac community in every way."
:/ oh well i tried...woo for anything good for macs!
Wow! I'm impressed! I was on a mac at my cousin's house and it had only 1 decent game I could find :/
If its open source on MacOSX wouldn't it be easily re-written for most platforms? Assuming a standard language anyway. Does OSX have something special in the programming language that could stop this?
I'm amazed at the Mac game industry actually. I'm amazed there ISN'T one. Hardly any games end up on the Mac. For something which is touted as being a multimedia platform, it's quite surprising. It can't simply be that there's a smaller userbase, because there are LOTS of people who use Macs (I'm not one of them, but oh well). Anyone have any ideas?
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
This will work, because Open Source games have been SO successful. So why not try writing them for NON-popular architectures?
Gee, how come no one has submitted an open source version of Cosmic Osmo? I mean this is a Mac game competition isn't it?
Also think it's wicked cool that the number of games submitted so far is 42. Speaking of which, why no open source port of the old HHGTG text-based adventure game?
"There is a thin line between ignorance and arrogance, and only I have managed to erase that line." - Dr. Science
Prizes worth of $11,000? Man, that's nickel and dimes. I wouldn't even call that a prize. How much is one hour of your life? That is the question you need to ask yourself. If you develop a game and it takes say, two-three months, that's a lot of hours.
Shake ya damn booty!
What when a game (the best/winning game?) is written in a portable manner. e.g. using standard C/C++ and portable libraries like SDL or OpenGL?
The game would run on Windows, Unix and MacOS(X).
Are the games written for this contest required to be Mac only?
Do you think they'll be porting chess, checkers, or solitaire to the Mac? I can't wait!
So this, what, doubles the number of games available for the Mac?
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
I just saw this link from NTK. Parody of some Apple advert or something aparently.
I hope its minesweeper or the networked hearts game.
If developers use the "uDevGame License", which is one of the license options for this then their game isn't really Open Source as defined by the OSI (and it certainly isn't Free Software)..
I just saw 42 postings wanting unpaid game dev teams on usenet. All claimed to have the perfect game idea but needed programmers, artists, etc to make it. Royalties were to be split up after each respective games goes bigtime.
Really someone should write a book about the phenomenon. When people find out it takes longer than a week, they tend to give up.
I think somebody should port Solitare and FreeCell to Mac. FreeCell already got the name figure out -- or would that be OpenFreeCell? FreeFreeCell? hmm...
but anyway. I swear Jobs can increase Apple's market share by 300% if he included Solitare with it. I mean, a windows machine usually spend 50% of its useable life on that program.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Boy, you can really tell who all the non-Mac users are when they say: 'MAC' intead of Macintosh. Regardless of the fact th
Wish I could find that Mac Gamer video clip....so appropriate. "I own a macintosh, I'm a gamer....well, I used to be." Anyone know what im talking about? Linkage would be good.
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
Not that it was WEAK, but until Direct X started being used for almost every game, most games were written to directly control VGA cards at the register level. This gave good performance that wasn't possible in a GUI environment, because of the overhead of having to use inefficient APIs to draw everything.
Well, Macs never had the option of directly controlling the video card registers. It wasn't allowed. You had to use QuickDraw to do everything.
With 3D accelerated games, and cards to support them, it was finally possible to do a Mac game decently, since OpenGL could be used to control the 3D card directy, mostly avoiding QuickDraw and all that overhead. There was also the short-lived GameSprockets API, that never really caught on, and as far as I know isn't used/supported by Apple anymore. There STILL isn't a good way to do 2D games on a Mac. And by good, I mean efficient and hardware accelerated.
The problem lies in the fact that most game developers use the proprietary DirectX API when they should be using OpenGL. If they stuck with cross platform API's like SDL and the like, it would take probably only a few extra days of development time to write a game that would work on Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Take Quake 2 & 3 for example... good code that works on 3 platforms.
I am a hardcore computer game player. I have been on the Mac platform at home since forever, and I have always found more quality games that I could use simltaneously.
:-)
Usually many of the best PC games make it to the mac, with a few exceptions. Agreed, we do not get all of the sucky PC games.
Quake +mods, UT + mods, Warcrafts, Diablos, Myth series, Warbirds, Giants, and a bunch of others, etc.. Can you play all of this and still have a life ? No !
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tmp.c:8: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
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Wow. You can't even write a "hello world" program. That's truely pathetic.
My other first post is car post.
Here is a good substitute for the competition :)
Three years ago when I was in college, mac gaming was pathetic. We had to wait 6-12 months for a game to come out, and the support and gameplay was buggy and crappy as hell. Games like Mechwarrior 2, FutureCop, and the TombRaider series ran like total shit on comparably equipped macs compared to PC's (Note: this is when macs and PC's were of very comparable power, with a 500 Mhz PIII up against a 500 Mhz G3).
Nowadays, the wait is still there, but typically only 2 weeks-1.5 months, and even a concurrent release thrown in there every now and then. [and then some games just take forever, like MaxPayne, and Fallout2, which are recent mac releases *boggle*]
The main game publishers for Mac, Aspyr, Bold by Destineer, MacSoft, MacPlay, Feral Interactive, Graphsim, all release 2-3 games a month. And the major players, like Blizzard and Id have adopted their own inhouse porting teams. So the mac platform sees about 10 releases a month. That may be a small subset of PC releases, but it's the 10 BEST games the PC's seen in the last season or so. Even my hardcore gamer friend go through like half that many a month.
I've had a gaming PC (JUST for games) for the past 3 years that I keep fairly current, and it doesn't see much use anymore. I don't consider mac game releases to be in short order.
A lot of people perceive mac releases to be some fraction of their PC counterpart, but in the last 12 months, there's been exactly ZERO games that I've wanted to play and couldn't get a mac vs. or expect one in the near future.
Specific games over the past few months that I've been wasting my life with: Warcraft III, Wolfenstein, Sim's, Civ III, Aliens vs. Predator, Medal of Honor, Black and White, UT, Giants, Baldur's Gate II, Icewind Dale.
With the exception of Half-Life/Counterstrike, and the MMORPG scene (UO/Neverrest/Asheron's, although this is changing very soon), it's been hard to find a hit PC game that's NOT available on the mac.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
So if it's open source, can I just take one of the entries already submitted, enhance it a little bit, and resubmit it?
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
Oh no! The non-Mac users got to you before you could finish your comment!
A smaller percentage user base can still equal lots of people. Consider.
The early rev iMacs shipped in the couple millions. The pro models ship somewhere near several hundred thousand per quarter. In terms of total sales of computers, the percentage is in the high single digits. That is, "small" user base.
But several million people, last I checked, is a LOT of people.
blog
Sounds like a number someone just made up. The whole thing is fake.
And I can include stupid bubbly interfaces to make stuff LOOK better. Yay superficial covering!
Suck.
I remember years ago, you didn't have to worry much about whether a game would run on your system. Devs are pushing the envelope so far that it's out of reach for 90% of all consumers, Mac and PC alike.
Most people regardless of their platform still use PC's with 500mhz processors or slower. However the specs for games such Doom3 are outrageous.
Devs used to care about a good storyline, exciting game play etc. Now it's all about who gets the best framerates, what game has the prettiest textures. I don't care what the game looks like anymore, thats all window dressing. I want a game that's FUN.
I happen to be a mac user and I can attest that when/if a game is ported to the Mac from the PC, it's usually a great game. You see far less junk on the Mac. The downside is we usually see the games a year or 2 later.
I play WC3 and AvP, other than that I stick with the console where I'm not locked into an "upgrade path" every six months. I don't care what the latest and greatest is. I want value out of what I own NOW.
Simply adding a Objective C wrapper around your SDL code would allow you to create cross-platform application that runs natively on Mac OS.
I have no idea how long it takes to code a game, but if it takes three months, as you say, then $11,000 is pretty damn good. That would be $44,000 a year.
In terms of monthly income, yes, but in terms of annual income, no. "Limit one entry per team" per competition. Besides, many will enter; few will win.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Is it fair to call Mac "The Gay Machine"?
-- Robin, the [gay] boy wonder
there's a new neighbor and she's as smart as she is beautiful!
It's hard being the ugly smart girl, eh?
No matter what them platform, Open Sourcxe competition should be promoted. The fact that in this case its for the macintosh is irrelevant. If its open source, it's good.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
..."Mac" and "Game" in the same sentence.
rofl
I have no life. I run Linux because of its well earned reputation for being "the" loser operating system. Since I have become an Linux user, I have been exposed to a whole new world of loser friends, whom I instant message, IRC, and generally avoid any real life contact with. It is really a pleasure to compute with other geeks such as myself. I plan on using my new Linux operating system as a way to entice and recruit other introverted losers like myself; it would be so helpful if you could produce more software which would appeal to others like myself, such as Lego Mindstorms, or that gay Gimp piece of shit. Thanks in advance.
Hooray for dot files! I hate Windows! Rah!
Johnny "kernal hax0r" Vespucci
Linus, is that you?
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
you should seriously take a class in HS english, idiot.
love,
-trolltime (looking for that -1, Flamebait)
Most applications written for MacOS X are not using the *NIX side of the API family, Cocoa. There is a second API, Carbon, that is derived from the traditional legacy Mac Toolbox/Quickdraw API. Carbon has two advantages: (1) It targets both MacOS X and MacOS 9. (2) It reuses existing knowledge, experience, tools, and libraries. These carbon apps are not really any easier to port to other platforms than traditional Mac apps. It can be done, but it's not as easy as going from one *NIX to another.
At least the games we have are quality
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
No but it'd double the amount of functioning neurons in your brain you lonely troll.
Yeah and you can tell all real 'PC' users because they say 'Personal Computer'.... What the hell are you talking about I've been a mac/apple user all my life and I say Mac. Mac mac mac mac mac.
Do PC users always have to connect machines with sexuality? Is this some leftover instinct from the days of oogling at 256 color jpegs? Was the pleasure you got from your floppy drive that wonderful that you hold such a grudge against Apple for killing it? Or is it simply because you want to present the immage of immaturity to the rest of the world?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Except that mac users are still fags.
Just ask the goatse guy.
Macintosh and Games haven't really been synonymous with each other at any point in Mac history. But, since their "Switch" campaign is on, this might spark my interest.
First came the news that OSX was in fact a BSD/*Nix derivative with Mac's pretty looks. That got my attention. Then came the news that they were keeping an x86 architecture port of OSX laying around. That got me thinking. Now, if someone comes up with a few nifty games to play on OSX, coupled with the aformentioned x86 port, I might just shun Winblows for good and give the Fruit Factor a try. All I ever do with my PC is cruise the 'Net, do some graphics work (which MacOS has always been good with), maintain my website, and play games occasionally to kill time. Music is another consideration, but since the advent of the MP3 and now OGG Vorbis, it's pretty much been cross-platform the whole time.
The addition of some nifty games and the x86 port would be all I need to consider diving headlong into a switch. Keep it coming, cause I'm listening now...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
First off, someone PLEASE meta-mod this into the GROUND. I will be actively meta-moderating in the hopes of finding this on my list for the next few weeks. This is a BLATANT Flamebait. +1 Insightful? I won't even call any names.
:-\ ). The PC is like the suit you can buy at Ames. Looks alright, works for what you need, not the most elegant thing but can be taylored to you needs, plus it's cheap.
To answer your question, troll, it's style. Pure and simple.
When have you ever met a homo who doesn't primp himself to be "pretty"?
Macs are the slickest computer solution. The hardware configs are easily known/coded for, our OS isnt' bloated with a million hardware config "maybes". The sleek plastic designs are sometimes kind of ugly (witness the toilet seat iBook! Yech!) but for the most part are well refined and thought out, both for appearance and functionality. The OS keeps it simple, while allowing flexibility.
The Macintosh is the Armani of the computer world. Well designed, comfortable, sleek, ( expensive
I'm Tokerat. I'm not gay, and I use a Macintosh. Three, actually. And I will never switch.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Hopefully this stupid survey conducted by Ipsos-Reid will not cast doubt on the importance I see of a strong and supportive partnership with our brothers to the south.
...
Quoting, Seven in ten (69%) Canadians think that the United States, because of its policies and actions in the Middle East and other parts of the world, bear some of the responsibility for the terrorist attacks on them, while 15% indicate that they believe that the U.S. bears all of the responsibility.
The question is overly broad and thus meaningless, additionally the timing is both inconsidered and just a cheap way of creating news by bashing Americans. Supporting a soverign nation (Israel) in its struggle for acceptance and a right to exist, and deploying military forces in Saudi Arabia when asked, does not constitute a justification for the cowardly act of September 11th.
For more information, here is an article, but more importantly, I think we should all Ipsos-Reid what we think of their "make news bullshit by bashing Americans" at
John Wright
Senior Vice-President
Ipsos-Reid Public Affairs
(416) 324-2900
To my American brothers, I am sorry for this type of survey, see to it that Ipsos-Reid doesn't do it again... Take the time, even if it is just a two-word email!
Tournament Management Online &
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char * YHL;
} msg;
int main () {
msg* YHBT;
YHBT->YHL = "HAND";
}
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
I'm amazed that something as stupid as that came out of your mind and hit your keyboard. Hint: learn something about that which you want to comment on before typing.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Q: Why do faggots wear ribbed condoms?
A: For better traction in the mud.
Q: What does a faggot and an ambulance have in common?
A: They both get loaded from the rear and go whoo-whoo!
Q: What do you call two faggots on a waterbed?
A: A fruit float!
Q: Have you heard about the Faggot Patch Dolls?
A: They come with A.I.D.S. and a death certificate.
Q: Why does Fred Flintstone use a Mac?
A: He wants to have a "gay old time".
Why is this offtopic? If I had moderator points, I'd call it "+1 Insightful".
My other first post is car post.
See this: delta tao "3/21/02 - We've started working on a new version of Eric's Ultimate Solitaire, featuring new games, awesome graphics, and X nativity. "
hey, remotely clever.
You can visit their site, see the postmortems from last year's game. Download the code from last year's entries. Then see the list of sponsors. Did you bother? No, if you had, then you would see that the contest isn't a "fake."
Just want to remind you that with the advent of OS X 10.2, the right and left buttons on two-button mice both work in OS X. Better late than never, and way easier than Ctrl-clicking as was the old practice.