Last time I made a blog entry I posted that I wanted to have AOTM for iPhone done by March 31st – Well that was a little over two months ago so that deadline flew by.
It *is* coming – It’s taken a bit longer than I had hoped. I really can’t get used to OSX and Xcode – Although Objective-C has been getting easier for me and it’s a nice little language, if only Xcode was more like Visual Studio with it’s great intellisense support.
The biggest issue I have found with iPhone game programming is the MASSIVE difference in performance between the iPhone simulator and the actual device – The simulator is actually just an x86 version running on your Mac within a nice looking iPhone chrome. But the actual device is alot less powerfull than a full desktop PC. Don’t get me wrong it’s still pretty powerful – So long as you program it the way it is intended to be programmed. Desktop PCs are so powerful that we often do things in an inefficent way because, well hey – It runs fine on most modern computers. On a mobile device you have to actually start thinking about performance – Which I actually kind of enjoy, unfortunately alot of my time is spent on getting the game to perform well and less on putting the actual game togeather.
But like I said, it is coming along – There is one fully playable level (on normal difficulty with a boss) and I’ve got a couple of in-game menu screens, I’ve shown it to a few people and the reception so far has been pretty positive.
Should I make another guess as to when it’s going to be done? Ok, how about in another three months time? August 31st perhaps?
#1 by Dirk on June 11, 2010 - 11:55 pm
Having used a lot of IDEs over the last 20 years or so, including VisualStudio and Eclipse, I don’t quite get the Xcode criticism (you are not in the minority, I read this all the time). I started using it about 2 years ago and I’ve never looked back, not even to Emacs. And Obj-C is by far my favorite language now, I just love it.
#2 by Joshua Smyth (Admin) on June 12, 2010 - 4:08 pm
I don’t use a Mac as my primary computer so lots of things I find annoying about Xcode are really just inherited from how OSX behaves and where that differs from windows. One of the issues I have with Xcode is that the shortcuts for IDE features that I use all the time – Indenting multiple lines, steping thru code in the debugger, jumping backwards and forwards thru the cursor stack are all hard to remember.
And debuging on the device, performing optimizations (which means many parts of my code look much more like C and alot less like Obj-C) and trying to find out what has been causing memory corruption issues as all been very educational.
Also I don’t think there is such a thing as a perfect IDE or a perfect programming language anyway – If you can’t point out a couple of things that you don’t like about your tools, I don’t think you know them well enough.