John Carmack planning a “graphical tour-de-force” for the iPhone
Ah, game developers (especially EA game developers, of which id software’s John Carmack is now one, after their announcement at E3 that they’d work together to publish games). They thrive on hype, and live, it seems sometimes, off of speculation. That’s probably why Carmack has told Forbes that not only does he love his iPhone, and not only does he not want to “announce anything specifically,” but id wants to make a game for the iPhone and “it would be,” according to Carmack, “a graphical tour de force.” See what we mean? Ah, game developers.
Anna Kang, who’s the president of id Mobile (no relation), says that any id game they might be working on for the iPhone wouldn’t be a new IP, so that puts it very much in the range of a Doom, Wolfenstein, or Quake game, and considering that another Wolfenstein sequel is being worked on right now, that probably makes it the most likely.
For his part, Carmack sounds really excited to have the iPhone as a platform (especially since he hasn’t always seen eye-to-eye with Apple) — he equates it in terms of power to a PS2 or Xbox, and says that a company could easily shell out $10 million on an iPhone game, be it a first person shooter or a deep MMORPG. But he admits that the 99-cent sales in the App Store can’t support that yet, and it probably wouldn’t be the best thing for id Mobile to pour their resources into something like that quite yet. Nevertheless, we’ll wait and see what they come up with.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Multitouch, multiscreen iPod touch Pong
Oh my. Still need convincing that the iPhone/iPod touch is the greatest gaming platform ever made? Then check this video of a couple Japanese researchers playing a game they claim to have put together “in about an hour”: multiscreen, touch-based Pong.
On first glance, it looks like the game is even checking orientation of the iPods, but if you watch it a little further, when things go faster, you can see that it’s actually just pushing the ball from screen to screen as it leaves. Still, if nothing else, a quick demo like this shows that multiple Touches (via a certain website, or on the same WiFi network, maybe, or — hopefully — just in close proximity to one another through Bluetooth or another protocol) can easily be made to connect multiplayer gamers.
As a demo, very nice (and it seems fun as a game as well). Can’t wait to see a full-featured game that takes advantage of all of the iPhone’s connectivity options.
[Via Waxy]
Popularity: 12% [?]
Bookwatch: Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X gets updated
Way back in December, our Christmas Gift Guide featured our pick of the many OS X-related books out there. One of the recommendations was the (very excellent) Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass - commonly referred to as ‘The Bible’ in the Mac development community.
At the time the book was a little outdated — however in the last couple of weeks an updated third edition has been published. New sections feature Objective-C 2.0, Core Data, Garbage Collection, Xcode 3 and Core Animation, meaning this third edition is all ready for many of the new technologies in Mac OS X Leopard.
At just $32 (via Amazon.com), this updated version clearly ought to be on every developer’s bookshelf (and aspiring developer’s wishlist).[Read]
Popularity: 13% [?]
