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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."
This will work, because Open Source games have been SO successful. So why not try writing them for NON-popular architectures?
I'm amazed, too. Why did you bother to comment here when you clearly know nothing about Macs?
There is a good, solid gaming industry for Macs. We don't usually get the games quite as promptly, and we don't see the less popular, marginal games from the PC world being ported over at all, but there is no dearth of good games available. Right now, my kids are playing various incarnations of the Sims, Black & White, Unreal, Age of Empires, etc...they have more games available than I can keep track of, at any rate.
Apple did their level best to discourage game development on the Mac, early on. They were worried about it being perceived as a game machine (as the IIc was) rather than a serious business computer (like IBM's entry offering). To that end, they managed development on the platform much like Sony and other console developers do today; access to technical documentation, development systems, and serious tools (C compilers, assemblers, etc.) was tightly controlled. You had to submit a project proposal and have it approved, and proposals for games were decidedly not welcome.
Not surprisingly, it worked.
Tech docs weren't available for the Mac until several years later, when the PC game market was already well established. The Mac was also somewhat hampered by the closed architecture and need for approval from Apple before marketing hardware - you couldn't just develop a zany 3D-accelerator video card because you wanted to - until the PC had practically conquered the market.
Of course, almost none of these reasons apply today - you can easily get the latest GeForce for your Mac - but there is a great deal of inertia in the industry, and the smaller userbase doesn't help. There is also a viscious circle at work here: because of the lack of games, Mac owners didn't buy their systems to play games, and aren't perceived as game buyers.
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.
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.
You don't need Objective C to run "natively" on Max OS. You can also use Java (Mac OS X at least), assembler, C, C++, Pascal, or anything else. If your application only uses SDL and standard C/C++ calls, there is no reason to "wrap" anything in some other language.