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Incredible iPhone Game Programming Tutorials With Video

John — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 08:56:54 +0000

Just like to turn you guys on to what are the best video iPhone game programming tutorials on the web so far in case you haven’t seen them.

– Update Jan. 2nd 2010 – Tutorial 11 has been added, and I have upgrade this list to reflect that.

These tutorials are from 71 squared. They run through the steps to creating a game on the iPhone in tremendous detail, and include source code. Included are in-depth videos.

Here they are:

Now these gents are also writing a book on iPhone game programming. So absolutely if you like their tutorials I suggest you check it out. I don’t think it’s available for pre-order yet but you can read some info about it here.

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My Top 10 Favorite iPhone Developer Blogs

John — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:56:29 +0000

I’m often asked how I keep up with all the new API’s available for an iPhone developer at each OS patch, and really the secret is just keeping up with some blogs. I use Google Reader, place the blogs in there, and skim over them. There’s alot of great blogs out there, these are the 10 that I currently keep in my Google Reader. You’ll go nuts trying to keep up with everything, I tried for awhile, but now I find I can get up to speed just with these resources.

iCodeBlog – Tremendous source of iPhone tutorials types. These guys have been coming out with tutorials since the very beginning, and they’ve got all sorts of Cocoa Touch tutorials here on popular topics like games, and twitter clients.

Cocoa With Love – An excellent Cocoa blog that also has severly terrific iPhone specific posts. This site occasionally gets into more advanced topics, and is an extremely high quality blog that has been around forever.

Jeff Lamarche’s Blog – A lot of great tutorials here from one of the co-authors of Beginning iPhone 3 Development. Use the search to get to the meat as there’s just so much here.

How To Make An iPhone App - Probably the best written iPhone specific blog out there, hasn’t t really gotten into advanced topics, but is updated frequently. Excellent for the beginner and created by the writer of How To Make an iPhone App downloadable ebook.

iPhone Development Bits – These guys go out and find the best iPhone development articles out there to put on their page. There’s lots of good resources to be found through here.

Cocos2D iPhone - Official Blog for the Cocos2D iPhone open source game engine, and future home of the programming guide (currently being written). If you’re interested in getting started with games on the iPhone this is a must bookmark.

Cocoa Is My Girlfriend – Cocoa is my girlfriend has been writing about Cocoa development for an extremely long time, and includes a large number of tutorials on Cocoa topics, although not specifically iPhone there is a lot of useful stuff here.

iPhone Incubator – Some excellent tutorials and tip for iPhone developers here. Assorted beginner->intermediate topics.

Adeem Basraa’s Blog – Some pretty good beginner focused tutorials out here.

Mobile Orchard – Has some good tutorials. They are somewhat hidden, and you’ll need to search to find them.

That’s it for my top 10 favorite iPhone developer blogs. If there’s any great, and active, ones out there that I’ve missed please mention them below.

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Easier Debugging With NSLog Statements

John — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:12:43 +0000

Something that comes up frequently, and something I’ve had difficulty in the past with myself is debugging iPhone apps. There is a fairly easy way to alleviate that problem, and that is to place NSLog statements that print out the name of the method, class, whatever information you like to the console so that you can find out the problem area of a program, however there is a big problem with NSLog statements, and that is that they seem to use a an overly large amount of system resources.

I’m not exactly sure why it is, but I’ve found NSLog statements can really slow down a program, and having any running in the release version of your app (even though there’s no console displayed) seem to have a dramatic impact upon performance. So you will want an easy way to turn them on, or off.

Unfortunately, this is generally done by placing #ifdefs all over your code so that the NSLog statements are not compiled out of debug mode, but I have found a better solution.

Karl Kraft has created a debuglog statement that does everything that NSLog does, but turns off outside of debug mode.

You can download the full project here: Debuglog

The details on how to use Debuglog are included in the link on Karl’s blog. Check it out, and it will speed up your debugging, you can even better the details of NSLog statements easily.

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UILabel Subclass – Align The Text How You Want!

John — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 06:33:02 +0000

I received a question in the last few days from an iPhone developer who was having difficulty aligning the text in a UILabel properly. The problem was that they needed the UILabel to accomodate multiple lines, but also needed to dynamically adjust the text, and the problem was that whenever there is only one line of text the vertical alignment was always centered.

I found a subclass in an older thread on the apple forums here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1759957

This what’s in the class:

// Label2.h

// (c) 2009 Ivan Misuno, www.cuberoom.biz

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>

typedef enum

{

VerticalAlignmentTop = 0, // default

VerticalAlignmentMiddle,

VerticalAlignmentBottom,

} VerticalAlignment;

@interface Label2 : UILabel

{

@private

VerticalAlignment _verticalAlignment;

}

@property (nonatomic) VerticalAlignment verticalAlignment;

@end

// Label2.mm

// (c) 2009 Ivan Misuno, www.cuberoom.biz

#import "Label2.h"

@implementation Label2

-(id)initWithFrame:(CGRect)frame

{

self = [super initWithFrame:frame];

if (!self) return nil;

_verticalAlignment = VerticalAlignmentTop;

return self;

}

-(void)dealloc

{

[super dealloc];

}

-(VerticalAlignment) verticalAlignment

{

return _verticalAlignment;

}

-(void) setVerticalAlignment:(VerticalAlignment)value

{

_verticalAlignment = value;

[self setNeedsDisplay];

}

// align text block according to vertical alignment settings

-(CGRect)textRectForBounds:(CGRect)bounds limitedToNumberOfLines:(NSInteger)numberOfLines

{

CGRect rect = [super textRectForBounds:bounds limitedToNumberOfLines:numberOfLines];

CGRect result;

switch (_verticalAlignment)

{

case VerticalAlignmentTop:

result = CGRectMake(bounds.origin.x, bounds.origin.y, rect.size.width, rect.size.height);

break;

case VerticalAlignmentMiddle:

result = CGRectMake(bounds.origin.x, bounds.origin.y + (bounds.size.height - rect.size.height) / 2, rect.size.width, rect.size.height);

break;

case VerticalAlignmentBottom:

result = CGRectMake(bounds.origin.x, bounds.origin.y + (bounds.size.height - rect.size.height), rect.size.width, rect.size.height);

break;

default:

result = bounds;

break;

}

return result;

}

-(void)drawTextInRect:(CGRect)rect

{

CGRect r = [self textRectForBounds:rect limitedToNumberOfLines:self.numberOfLines];

[super drawTextInRect:r];

}

@end

To use this class simply use Label2 wherever you would normally use UILabel, and with the setVerticalAlignment method you can set the alignment to the top, middle, or bottom with the VerticalAlignmentTop, VerticalAlignmentMiddle, or VerticalAlignmentBottom attributes. Very Handy!

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The Open Source iPhone Game Engine Comparison

John — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 05:40:55 +0000

I’m often asked about which iPhone game engine to use, and I know most people are looking for a free game engine so here is a comparison of the different open source iPhone game engines that actually have apps out there.

Update. I’ve added in the Sparrow Framework.

Sparrow Framework

The Sparrow Framework is a very lightweight 2D game engine created in Objective-C. In a very short amount of time I was able to understand the framework, and I find it to be very intuitive.

While I have not done much Flash game programming the developers state that the game engine was created with Flash game developers in mind.

The game framework includes all the necessary features you’d require for creating a basic 2D game such as easy animation, and a sound engine.

Cocos2D IPhone

The Cocos2D iPhone game engine is a port of a game engine originally created in Python and converted to iPhone Objective-C. As you can tell from the name, Cocos2D is designed for 2D games, that being said, although the engine is in a 2D world, the engine includes a growing collection of high quality 3D special effects.

Cocos2D has been used in many games on the iPhone app store, you can visit the official site here, where many are listed.

Cocos2D is the first engine to check out, while many may be turned off by the engine not supporting a 3d world, if you look at most of the top iPhone games the gameplay is 2D, in fact the iPhone’s touch screen controls can make it difficult to operate in a 3D world.

Also included is support for the in-game Chipmunk engine, and the latest version of Cocos also includes an OpenAL based sound engine.

The engine provides more examples than any of the other engines out there because of the large community. Overall I’d say the engine is as easy to use as any engine that does not have an environment editor.

Uses the LGPL license.

Sio2Engine

The SIO2 game engine is an excellent 3D game engine written in C. There is a free oepn source version, and a an indie version for $49. The free eidtion requires you to show a splash screen at the start of your game illustrating your use of the engine. This in my opinion is extremely fair considering the quality of the engine.

The game engine uses blender in it’s toolchain for scene and model creation. If you haven’t used Blender, it is a sophisticated open source 3D modeling program. In my opinion this is the only thing I don’t really like about sio2, while some love it, I can’t stand using blender as I’ve found it can’t compare to the top commercial modeling programs. Fortunately there are many blender plugins that allow you to import a wide variety of modeling formats.

SIO2 comes with an excellent set of tutorials, and provides support for sophisticated features such as skeletal animation, and soft-body physics which are explained in the tutorials.

I’ve found the performance of the latest version of the SIO2 game engine, version 1.4 to provide significantly better performance than previous versions. If you haven’t checked out SIO2 in awhile then I suggest you check it out again.

I recommend SIO2 to those who insist on a 3D world and thus can’t use Cocos.

Oolong Engine

The Oolong game engine is a 3D engine written in C++, and provides excellent performance. The downside of the Oolong engine is that it is difficult to use for those that are not familiar with OpenGL ES.

Oolong provides support for a wide variety of features, and very good performance, as I said my only problem with Oolong is that it is difficult to use. This is a low-level engine designed for programmers so if you’re just getting into game development I would stay away.

You will find the latest version on google code, there is very little documentation for Oolong, but the community is very active, and you can get answers to many of your questions there.

I would recommend Oolong to those looking to create their own game engine looking for something to start with.

Uses the MIT license.

Irrlicht Engine

I mention Irrlicht here only because I received a message from someone stating that it was available on the iPhone.

The Irrlicht game engine is a 3D game engine written in C++.

While there is no official port available on the Irrlicht website for the iPhone with some tinkering I was able to get the OpenGL ES version running on the iPhone — somewhat. You will find the OpenGL ES version hidden away in the repository.

Irrlicht is an excellent open source engine that has support for an extremely wide variety of file formats, and has the best support for the “classic” BSP format that I’ve seen in an open source game engine. There are also numerous other tools that have been created for the engine.

All this being said, I can’t recommend Irrlicht because there is no official port, and if you check out the forums there really is no one willing to provide help to those looking to get it running on the iPhone although some have created apps running on the iPhone.

The Irrlicht engine uses the Zlib license.

Summary

Cocos2D makes an excellent first choice for those developing a 2D iPhone game. You will learn Objective-C while using the engine, and the engine has been proven in a wide variety of games.

For 3D games my choice is SIO2, although I’m not a fan of blender this does make it more accessible than the other proven 3D iPhone game engines.

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Push Notification Server Tutorial

John — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:01:59 +0000

Hi everyone, sorry about the frequency of posts as of late, I was out of town for a few days, and accepted a ft position for the next couple of months, so I am currently overwhelmed.

Something I’ve been looking into mainly for testing purposes is push notification. Now, push notification can really mess up an app so you have to be able to deal with it.

Creating a push notification server can be complex especially if you’re not a web developer.

I found this great tutorial here:
Push Notification Server Tutorial

Which does a great job of showing how it’s done.

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Doing Some iPhone Game Programming

John — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 07:35:44 +0000

Just in case there’s any graphics designers interested, I have finally finished off some more of the contract work, and with a lighter load, my next ambition is to do some iPhone game programming.

My intent is to develop a number of iPhone games in a short amount of time. Ultimately all will be open sourced, released as 0.99 cent or free games, and have coinciding tutorials written. I actually created a very simple game this evening in a couple of hours that could already use the styling of an artist. I’ve planned out the next few games, and they shouldn’t take to long, all the games will be 2D, the first few written wiith Cocoa, and the rest using Cocos2D.

So just in case there’s any graphic artists out there reading interested in the possibility of some publicity and possibly profit from iPhone graphics work feel free to contact me. Please understand that my intent with the games is for publicity, although I do believe future work customizing/rebranding these games is possible after talking with a few peers.

Thanks for reading.

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Update For Cocos 2D iPhone Game Engine

John — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 08:44:51 +0000

The excellent and free Cocos2D iPhone game engine has been updated with a plethora of new features.

The highlights include:

a new sound engine

touch dispatcher

faster actions

an improved particle system

If you haven’t tried Cocos and are looking to develop a 2d game on the iPhone quickly without having to purchase a commercial engine you should check out Cocos2D here.

[via cocos2d for iPhone]

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iPhone OpenGL ES 3D Collision Detection Tutorials

John — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 01:47:18 +0000

Simon Maurice, has added two new tutorials to his collection of iPhone OpenGL ES Tutorials which I mentioned on my iPhone OpenGL ES resources page.

Tutorials:
1. Collision Detection
2. Collision Detection 2: Moller & Trumbore’s Fast Triangle Ray Intersect

**** Tutorials are currently deactivated they may be back in the future (due to contract issues with the Author and employer).

I haven’t had a chance yet to check these out, but they look fantastic. Just looking from the pictures I can see that they are damn cool.

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Avoid Retain Cycles In Objective-C

John — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:32:44 +0000

Found an excellent set of rules from Matt Gallagher on how to avoid retain cycles in Objective-C.

Uh-Oh A Class Is Still Retained Somewhere…

A problem that can occur in Objective-C is that when you start sharing objects between classes and increasing the retain count you can end up with a situation where one class inherits from another, and then when you want to release the object does not get released from memory because it is being retained by a class lower down the class hierarchy.

One Basic Rule

Now if this all sounds confusing, Matt explains everything well in his article, and has created a set of 5 rules. Ultimately it comes down to one basic rule:

"an object may only retain something indefinitely if it is hierarchically senior. If you don’t know which object is senior, you must work it out before you retain. If there is no clear senior object — you should redesign so that there is."

For a more detailed detailed explanation (with diagrams) be sure to check out: Rules To Avoid Retain Cycles

[Via: Cocoa With Love]

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