http://developer.popcap.com/forums/blog.php This is the PopCap Games Developer Program discussion forum. en Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:21:00 GMT vBulletin 60 http://developer.popcap.com/forums/images/misc/rss.jpg http://developer.popcap.com/forums/blog.php http://developer.popcap.com/forums/blog.php?b=4 Sat, 02 Aug 2008 17:00:22 GMT During development of most projects it becomes necessary at one point or another to write various tools to help in the creation of data for your... During development of most projects it becomes necessary at one point or another to write various tools to help in the creation of data for your game. These can be in the form of level editors, layout editors, profile editors, ect. These are tools that you do not always ship with the game but they are necessary to assist with the games production.

Now for the PopCap framework we could use PopCap to create our tools if we wanted to use the same engine for our tools as we used for the game. This works well in some cases but in others you might need to use C# as it provides a bit more power and quite a few additional controls (while still allowing rapid development).

However if you are working on something cross platform (read anything different from windows) then you start having different problems. Your first instinct might be to write the tool for the platform you are currently on, but when you figure that a lot of designers use windows based platforms, you must design your tools to be cross platform. When I was looking around I saw that Silverlight is still new, Flex might work but my options where either fiddle around with Flex Builder for students (which I didn't want to use in anything related to a commercial project), or use FlashDevelop. Of course using FlashDevelop for a tool is kind of bad as I don't want to have to manually create my user interface through code (this is a real pain).

So I did what many tool developers in a similar situation have done in the past and I settled on Java. Java is a pretty safe bet when it comes to tools as it is quite cross platform, you can find GUI editors for it, and I have used tools created in it before. Now the problem with Java is that there are a lot of different IDE's for it and they are not all created equal. At first I went with Eclipse as everyone was saying great things about it, but if your not prepared to spend money to get a GUI editor plugin then forget about it unless you want to lose your sanity trying to get your gui right through code.

In the end I found that the NetBeans IDE provided exactly what I needed but the controls provided with Swing were too limited for my purposes. After searching around even more I found OpenSwing which contained the property editor control that I needed!

I suppose the morale of the story is even though there are a lot of different programs on the market that you can use for a job, a lot of times only a couple of them will actually work for the specific problem and with the criteria that you need.

This also speaks for the point that it is really good to know a lot of different languages as I am switching between Java, Objective C 2.0, and C++ for various projects! ]]> vortex http://developer.popcap.com/forums/blog.php?b=4 http://developer.popcap.com/forums/blog.php?b=3 Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:17:35 GMT Hello everyone and thank you for viewing my blog! This seems like a cool feature and I wanted to experiment with it a bit. The first thing that I... Hello everyone and thank you for viewing my blog! This seems like a cool feature and I wanted to experiment with it a bit.

The first thing that I wanted to mention is that an update to my tutorial series will be around a month away. I am going on vacation for two weeks in a couple of days and so I will not have access to the PopCap framework during that time. In the mean time feel free to ask questions and post suggestions! Also due to some new forum restrictions concerning the posting of images I am planning to port my entire tutorial series to my own website. I will try to add a bunch of cool features to the website so that the format is better and I will touch up the tutorials a bit.

Currently I am working on a PC project and an IPhone project. Developing for the IPhone has been an interesting experience! I have had to learn Objective C 2.0, the Apple IPhone SDKs, and OpenGL ES. Not as easy as working with the PopCap framework! I really think the IPhone has tremendous potential as a casual game platform, however the hoops that developers have to jump through to create for the platform is a huge limiting factor.

I particularly don't like how the SDK is only available on the Mac OSX as that prohibits a lot of PC casual developers from being able to use the SDK. Additionally you have to pay a $100 fee to be able to post the games to the iTunes store AND to run your games on the device. All together the startup costs have totaled several thousand dollars and we are still just beginning.

I decided to share this information in this blog post not because I am trying to go off topic. As developers it is important to stay current on the latest cutting edge technology! I hope to write a guide on the steps required to start creating games for the IPhone from a PC developer point of view quite soon.

Well that is all for now, thanks for reading! ]]> vortex http://developer.popcap.com/forums/blog.php?b=3