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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."
If the game uses too much ObjectiveC with Apple APIs it will be hard to rewrite. But a good way to make games is to use SDL (http://www.libsdl.org/). It allows games to be compiled on linux, bsd, MacOSX, windows ... and take advantage of OpenGL.
Here is a good substitute for the competition :)
...because of the overhead of having to use inefficient APIs to draw everything.
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
QuickDraw takes advantage of any QuickDraw accelerated video cards, and many of the Mac-specific cards supported this until 3D acceleration become popular.
QuickDraw is VERY fast (250Mhz machine, 22FPS full screen with CopyBits()).
GameSprockets is still a part of Mac OS X today, although it's mostly used to do screen resolution changes.
Ever seen SpriteWorld?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
The uDevGame license was created because truly open-source or free software is a concept some Mac developers haven't learned to embrace yet. In a nutshell the license tries to ensure that code is used for educational purposes (figure out how they did it) rather than just used. This also makes possible commercial development of the game more of a possibility, an issue that was important to some potential entrants. However we also give most of the traditional licenses (GPL, etc) as options, and they are being used. Griggs Webmaster of iDevGames.com
This is a contest, not an attempt to hire cheap labor!
We have considered running it without prizes, but there is no reason why we can't help good developers along by giving them tools they may need.
It's not necessary to work full-time on a game. Indeed Mac game programming is a hobby rather than a profession for most iDevGames users.
The contest is fun and somewhat challenging for developers, mostly for the fun of it, but we do have some good prizes too.
The Mac community gets some cool new games to play, source code to learn from, and probably more skilled developers.
BTW, for uDevGame 2001 we had only $4200 in prizes, but we still had 24 entries. Now, thanks to the generous support of various companies we have more than doubled our prize pool.