http://www.pangeasoft.net/book/

The warehouse lost their remaining copies of the book so they decided to publish it online for free. Jolly decent of them!

Is it for newbies?

Hairball183 Wrote:Is it for newbies?

No. But there is a lot of very useful info that you might find handy as you're learning.

And it doesn't help that it's all for Carbon. And the projects are out of date. The OpenGL stuff might be handy, but some of that is out of date too, like using VARs (should use VBOs now instead).

Paging through my copy just now. I would say a solid 2/3 of it is either useless because it is Carbon, or it is outdated, or it is just flat-out not a recommended way to do things. There is some good general advice about the business aspect of it near the end. The anaglyph stuff is pretty neat and I made my own implementation of it. The Maya plug-in stuff is not up to date at all, and I wouldn't recommend writing plug-ins for it anyway -- use MEL instead. Well, and I would recommend giving Cheetah3D a shot (or maybe even Blender if you can) before Maya anyway because it is now owned by the Autodesk empire. The USB stuff I believe is very handy, especially if you're writing your own implementation and want to support older OS X versions. The OpenAL stuff is probably useful.

HID has a new, easier API in Leopard, so even the HID stuff is rapidly losing usefulness.

Still, it's a very generous move. Seriously, what's with the anti-Pangea sentiments I always seen to gather around here?

Fenris Wrote:Still, it's a very generous move. Seriously, what's with the anti-Pangea sentiments I always seen to gather around here?

Sorry, I didn't mean to come off sounding anti-Pangea at all... I'm a HUGE fan of Brian Greenstone!!!

I was merely trying to be frank about the relative values of the content in the book as it stands today. One thing I will say is that the book offers a rare glimpse into some of the inner workings of one of the most successful independent Mac devs around. You can take that for whatever it means to you, but I've been pretty inspired by Pangea's stuff over the years. But that doesn't change the fact that using Carbon is not recommended, nor GetKeys, nor VARs, nor many other things which I estimate is around 2/3 of the book. Or the fact that the projects are outdated and won't even run on some machines nowadays because of OpenGL extension incompatibilities, which are relatively easy to fix, but still... Again, definitely not trying to come off as a downer about it.

[edit] Oh yeah, and I don't mean to sound unappreciative about it either, but I actually bought a copy when it first came out, so the fact that he's giving it away now is pretty inconsequential to me. If anything, I could be complaining about that, but I actually think it's a very nice gesture. [/edit]

Ah-ha. I started another thread on this topic. Oops.

In answer to "is it for newbies?" - I'd say no. I was half expecting to find how Greenstone developed Nanosaur and that was not the case. It contained many tips and tricks on detailed aspects of game design: while interesting did not help a newbie. As previous commenter, Anotherjake, stated the most interesting bits were Greenstone's attempts are self-publishing; not just being internet based but going retail. Distinctly non-technical but a good read.

You don't want to know how he developed Nanosaur. I ported it to OS X (privately because the dork refuses to let it be released at all) and it's wacky and ancient.

FreakSoftware Wrote:You don't want to know how he developed Nanosaur. I ported it to OS X (privately because the dork refuses to let it be released at all) and it's wacky and ancient.

I do! I do! It may be wacky and ancient but what I currently developing is probably wackier and definitely more ancient!

So you can't release the Nanosaur-X program? Why did Greenstone release the source code if he didn't people to port it to OS-X etc?

FreakSoftware Wrote:You don't want to know how he developed Nanosaur. I ported it to OS X (privately because the dork refuses to let it be released at all) and it's wacky and ancient.

I think he did a pretty good job with the original Nanosaur. It looked and played rather well on the original iMac and as far as wacky programming is concerned that was kind of necessary. Writing games on Mac OS 8 back then was like trying to get your toaster to do video editing.

Yeah, I agree. I don't think it's really any whackier than the Marathon source. Looking at it now though, it's not very useful since it is written for QuickDraw 3D. I must admit that I kinda miss QD3D... (I know, I know: Heretic!)

If you miss QuickDraw 3D, there's always Quesa, a cross-platform open-source implementation of QuickDraw 3D on OpenGL. But you're nuts

Don't take me wrong, It wasn't horribly written. It was organized pretty well; Heck I understood it and I knew nothing. The wacky part is more of QD3D being wacky (I never understood the QD3D parts very much at all).

And yes, if you want to use Quesa, you're wacky

Quesa is kinda neat, and I've known about it for years, but no thanks, I'm perfectly happy with OpenGL now. Don't worry, I do still possess some sanity... sort of.