Learning iPhone Game Programming – available on Safari Rough Cuts
I’m really pleased to announce that my book “Learning iPhone Game Programming: A Hands-On Guide To Building Your First iPhone Game” is now available in Safari Rough Cuts.
Read more
Author Archive
Voices That Matter Conference – 24th to 25th April
I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be speaking at the Voices That Matter conference in Seattle, Washington. The conference runs from April 24th to the 25th and has some great speakers such as Aaron Hillegass the author of Cocoa Programming For Max OS X and founder of the Big Nerd Ranch.
My talk is about learning iPhone game programming and will cover many of the topics I have covered on the blog and inside my forthcoming book “Learning iPhone Game Programming: A hands-On Guide To Building Your First iPhone Game”.
If your in the area it would be good to see you there and if you are a blog reader make sure you come up and say hi :o)
Mike
Collision Detection Methods
I’ve had a few queries about collision detection recently so I decided to share some code I’ve used to detect collisions between two circles as well as rectangles vs circles.
I will be doing a tutorial on this as soon as possible, but for the moment this code could be useful.
In SLQ I am using AABB (Axis Aligned Bounding Boxes) for the collision checks. Each entity is responsible for providing its collision bounds as a CGRect. Its then a simple process of checking each entities CGRect against another using the CGRectIntersectsRect method.
Read more
If you write it they will come!!
…by they I mean of course the edits to the book. It’s in technical review now and the edits from the reviewers are starting to come through. This is really exciting as I’m starting to see what people think about the book. So far the feedback has been really positive.
I’m due to have all edits for the book by the middle of March and due to have them all addressed by the end of the month. The book should also be up on Safari Rough Cuts very soon and I’ll let you know as soon as that happens.
Read more
Book Update
I’ve had a number of people ask about progress with the book, so I thought I would do a quick post about it.
First of all I’m really excited about getting the book completed and into peoples hands. The great feedback I’ve had on the blog has really helped push this project forward and it would be great to get it out to everyone. I’m currently working on the last few chapters and the plan is to have the book up on Safari Rough Cuts in the next few weeks. This will allow people early access to the book and a way to provide feedback before the book is finally published.
The game that accompanies the book, Sir Lamorak’s Quest is also almost finished as you will have seen in SLQ Update post. I’ve just got a little tweaking to do on some AI and then finish the map.
Read more
SLQ Video Update
I’ve created a new video of SLQ to show progress. The game is almost complete now so I wanted to show everyone how it was looking. There are a couple of small areas to still fix. I’m still tweaking some sound effects for example and also working on the final map.
So, I hope you enjoy the preview and a chance to see the game being developed with the book I’m writing.
Mike
New version of Tiled
The guys over at mapeditor.org have been really busy. They have redesigned their website but more importantly, they have released Tiled Qt 0.4.0. This version of Tiled is a re-write of the Java version using Qt. This version is much quicker than the Java version and looks WAY better too.
Read more
Video downloads
We have had a number of requests from people asking if they can download the tutorial videos. This is something we have been looking into for a while so that we can find a solution that is not going to cost a fortune. The amount of bandwidth downloading the videos needs can end up being expensive.
Read more
Problem with Tutorials being investigated – FIXED
There is currently a problem with the streaming of the video tutorials which we are investigating. We will get them back up as soon as possible.
Mike
UPDATE 11/01/10: Videos should now be working.
Bitmap Font Update
I’ve been meaning to update the bitmap font code for a while. I made a number of changes to this code for the book as I found problems with the rendering of characters for some fonts. This was done to bugs in my code that positioned each character rendered. I fixed these for the book code and I’ve just updated the Tutorial 4 project code with the same fixes.
If you were seeing odd alignment of characters then the fixes in the Bitmap Font tutorial code should sort them out. It also ensures that the point provided when rendering text is used as the bottom left hand corner of the first character.
Hope this helps people and let me know how you get on.
Mike
