[MW Forums]

Pangea Software Inc. is taking a break from its usual schedule of releasing Macintosh-only games, to teach developers interested in learning how to program games for the Macintosh. The company plans to release "Pangea Software's Ultimate Game Programming Guide for Mac OS X" by the end of October. more

[irolley]

Hum.. I though most mac C/C programmers now switched to Obj-C. I would have loved to get such a book but knowing that it is C... hum... procedural language, bwark !
I wonder if it could be feasible to write a simple 3D game using Java on Mac, while using the capabilities of the OpenGL layer. Anyone knows if apple plan to open the Obj-C OpenGL framework to Java, like they did for many other Frameworks ? Maybe it is already ?

[TheBoyKen]

In the UK it's 19-ish USD shipping, as the one and only shipping option. That's half the (discounted) price of the book, so mailed their support to ask if Amazon etc. will be stocking it. Still awaiting answer (although in fairness I only asked 5 mins ago!).
Ken

[TheBoyKen]

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I though most mac C/C programmers now switched to Obj-C

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Although Obj-C is great for writing apps, it might not be the best language for writing OS X games (yes I know id used Obj-C to do Quake in first!). For ported games, there is no compelling reason (as you'd have to port the code, and move to a different language too (eg. C -> Obj-C)... double trouble. For new games, you still have to call all the OpenGL stuff in C anyway, so only a portion of the game could be in Obj-C.

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I would have loved to get such a book but knowing that it is C... hum... procedural language, bwark!

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Well Obj-C is a superset of C, i.e. C code works inside Obj-C classes fine. The author probably did it in C for 3 reasons:
[1] speed
[2] flexibility... C can be used within C, C or Obj-C
[3] Reasons [1] and [2] keep the target audience as large as possible.
Also OpenGL is a C API, and you can only do AltiVec in Assembler, C or Fortran... not Obj-C. (You can make AltiVec optimisations from an Obj-C app by writing the fast AltiVec parts in C). So doing the book in Obj-C would have inevitably had to stray into C anyway to accomplish the above.

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I wonder if it could be feasible to write a simple 3D game using Java on Mac

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There is a Java 3D library called Java3D, and another that offers much of OpenGL's functionality, so yes this shouldn't be a problem.

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Anyone knows if apple plan to open the Obj-C OpenGL framework to Java, like they did for many other Frameworks ? Maybe it is already ?

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Apple have made their own Obj-C frameworks (eg. Foundation / AppKit) open to Java. OpenGL does not have an Obj-C API so I'm not sure I understand your point here. There is a class called NSOpenGLView (in AppKit) which is available to both Obj-C and Java, if that's what you're referring to? Within an NSOpenGLView you can then call © OpenGL calls.
Hope this helps, let me know if I've missed the point completely,
Ken

[TheBoyKen]

Stop the clock, this just in from Brian Greenstone himself:

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Yes, we will be putting it up on Amazon, but I don't know when. My guess is mid-late November.
The ISBN number is 0-9761505-0-6

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[quick_silver]

If you want to do Java and OpenGL, check out the GL4Java Homepage. There is a port available of GL4Java that works on Mac OS X (and OS 9 if you want it). This port was originally done by Gerard Ziemski but he no longer works on it. However, you can get the port from here courtesy of Dmitry Markman.