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Development on Macs

Started by choffstein Mar 19, 2005 at 10:23 AM 5 replies 1.1k views

Original Post

117

Mar 19, 2005 at 10:23 AM

I am currently looking into getting a new laptop (within the next 3 months), and one that has really caught my eye is the 15" Apple Powerbook. I absolutely love it. Now, I have always developed on windows. Everything I know is win32 and DirectX. However, I will be keeping my windows laptop for that. What I really want to know is what are my cross platform APIs, that can work on a mac. I figure SDL for window setup and OpenGL for rendering would be my best bet. On the SDL page, however, it does not say it has support for MacOS X. Though, it has Linux support, so I figure someone must have ported it over. Anyway, does anyone have any recommendations? I have absolutely no problem switching from DirectX to OpenGL (I would love to learn both), but would SDL serve my needs for a cross platform window creator? How much tweaking would it take for each port? Does anyone have any experience with SDL on MacOSX? Does anyone here develop on a Mac who doesn't strictly do Java? Any thoughts, concerns, or regrets? Thanks a lot. -visage

Zakwayda

1,120

Zakwayda

Mar 19, 2005 at 10:40 AM

Have you checked out idevgames.com yet? If not, it's a site focused on Mac game development. I'm guessing you could get some of the answers to your questions there.

I develop on a Mac, but as I haven't done any Windows development I can't give much input on cross-platform issues.

Derakon

Mar 19, 2005 at 11:27 AM

I'm currently writing my game using SDL on a Mac. It's not a problem at all, really. Now granted, I'm not using the XCode IDE; I'm just working from the command line with g++ and gdb, since I'm more comfortable there. Installing the SDL for me was just a matter of download/config/make/make install. I don't know if it's more complicated if you want to use XCode. Since my game is 2D, I don't really need any of the more powerful OpenGL capabilities. In fact, I've yet to make an OpenGL function call; the SDL has had everything I've needed.

As for porting to and from Windows, I wouldn't know. I eventually hope to port my work to Windows, but I'll need a mostly-finished product first. Some system calls (e.g. using Sleep() instead of nanosleep()) will need to change, and I'll probably have some endian problems with my data files, but I think everything else should be instantly portable. Of course, I haven't tried yet.

H_o_p_s

115

H_o_p_s

Mar 19, 2005 at 1:37 PM

For the little bit of C++ programming that I do on my mac, I just use jEdit. From jEdit you can get plugins that can handle of your compliling needs, as well as stuff like dot complete. I just never got around to liking XCode, however many poeple do.

As far as taking that C++ code and porting it... haven't tried. However, if your not doing specific gpu stuff you can run .net in Virtual PC and see if it runs in there. For those of you that would say that VPC is too slow: I run win2k-advServer , and I can run EDI's Mornings Wrath at 20fps at 1024x768.

But anyway, I recommend the 15" pb any day.

Ravuya

298

Ravuya

Mar 19, 2005 at 1:39 PM

Quote:
Original post by visage
I figure SDL for window setup and OpenGL for rendering would be my best bet. On the SDL page, however, it does not say it has support for MacOS X. Though, it has Linux support, so I figure someone must have ported it over.

This is what I do, and it works fine on my 12" Powerbook.

wyrzy

Mar 19, 2005 at 1:43 PM

Quote:
Original post by visageOn the SDL page, however, it does not say it has support for MacOS X.

What do you mean it doesn't say OS X is supported?

Quote:
From http://www.libsdl.org/index.php
Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Windows, ... MacOS X, ... . There is also code, but no official support, ... .

There's even a Project Builder and XCode dev. package download.

Quote:
From http://www.libsdl.org/download-1.2.php (bottom of the page)
MacOS X:
SDL-devel-1.2.8.pkg.tar.gz (Project Builder + XCode)

igni ferroque

Mar 20, 2005 at 1:51 PM

The MacOS X installer for the SDL SDK installs as a MacOS X Framework bundle, so you can use it with Xcode and gcc like any other framework. If you stick to standard C and POSIX routines, and SDL/OpenGL library calls, then porting should not be an issue (except for the aformentioned endianness issue).

It's nice to see some new converts on this board ;). I hope your experience is enjoyable, and I'll be happy to answer any futher questions you may have.

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