What do I use, in a 2D game, to make objects display on the screen, and how?

I'm an experienced programmer from a C++, Visual Basic, and Java perspective, on Windows, and I really have no idea what I'm doing with xCode.

I just need a little window where I can display graphics. That's all, lol...

I would prefer to be able to display bitmaps if at all possible...

sounds like you want SDL

Canter Wrote:What do I use, in a 2D game, to make objects display on the screen, and how?

For all games on the Mac we recommend OpenGL. Even though it is presented as being primarily a 3D graphics API, it is also used for 2D.

Quote:I just need a little window where I can display graphics. That's all, lol...

Little window, big window, makes no difference... A popular point of view that newcomers to the Mac have is that it might use a frame buffer that you blit to, like old-school games. That is not really how things are done anymore however. The modern, practical game graphics path consists of two parts (used together):

Part 1) You have to use a `windowing' API to work on top of the OS for things like menus, mouse input, full-screen etc. Popular choices are SDL, GLUT, Cocoa, or Carbon. SDL is cross-platform and generally geared toward games. GLUT is cross-platform as well; it's pretty bare bones but cuts to the chase real easy. Carbon and Cocoa are both Apple system-level APIs designed to do conventional apps, but of course, can be used for games too. Cocoa is the preferred (Apple recommended) path for new apps, and Carbon is largely viewed to be there to support legacy paths (older ways of doing things). I would recommend going for GLUT for just a bit until you get into the swing of things, and then move on to SDL (or Cocoa).

Part 2) You have to learn how to use OpenGL, which does the actual graphics on top of the windowing API described in part 1 above.

Quote:I would prefer to be able to display bitmaps if at all possible...

All modern graphics APIs display bitmaps so that won't be a problem.