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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
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?
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.
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.
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. If it takes two months, that's even better. Then you'd be making the equivalent of $66,000 a year.
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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 !
Considering that you think 44k-66k is good money for a developer, I'm gonna take a shot in the dark and say you aren't from California.
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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.
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
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?
That's kind of a simplistic analysis. First, if you divide the potential winnings by the number of serious entrants, you get a better idea of the actual value of the prize being offered. Say that, of the 42 currently being developed, 22 are actually going to send in a finished game. Each of the 22 puts in 2 months of normal working hours on their projects. That's $11,000 being paid out for 44 man/months of effort.
Sure, if you were a truly great coder who had no doubt of your ability to win, then the perceived value would be a lot higher. But if you're that good, the only thing stopping you from making more than $66,000 is you.
The main motivations are likely to be street cred and sheer coding enjoyment.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I know this was a joke, but surprisingly Chess has been included with every release of MacOS X. The first time I saw it there was in 1998 I believe. Apple had been working on MacOS X Server, and had given CNN (where I worked at the time) a pre-release copy to use for our quicktime streaming servers. Fun stuff, it's come such a long way since then.
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.
Mac OS X already has chess. You can find it as /Applications/Chess.app.
For Classic try SigmaChess or MacChess.
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/
I was joking. ;) Does it still come with the "Jigsaw Puzzle" game?
or
"Linux" and "Desktop"
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
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.
For a couple months of doing what I do for a hobby (this is a contest, contests get entered by hobbyists) I'd say 11 grand is nice. That would get me 2 nice new G4s and some nice developer software packages.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Because the only way to get games is to make them?
Not only that, but I suggest you take another look at the mac game market.
RTCW
UT
Q3
Civilization
AOE2
Max Payne
Deus Ex
Oni
Jedi Outcast
Myst 3
and plenty of others
not only that, but maybe you should check out www.ambrosiasw.com
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
At least the games we have are quality
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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
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
Absolutely right. What IS considered a living wage in California?
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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?
typedef struct st_msg {
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.
Why is this offtopic? If I had moderator points, I'd call it "+1 Insightful".
My other first post is car post.
I didn't mean to imply that there was something nefarious going on with the contest. The parent post was describing the contest as a way to make a living, and I was merely approaching it from the angle he chose. I do apologize for any confusion.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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.