As Pocket Gamer reports, the first games that support Facebook Connect have appeared in the App Store.  Facebook Connect is a framework provided by Facebook that developers can utilize in order to allow players to link games to their Facebook profile for automatic posting of high score info to their profile feeds.

A recent update to Tap Tap Revenge 2 [App Store] (v2.0.1) adds Facebook Connect functionality to the game and iBowl's [App Store] recent (v5.0) update brings the functionality to the SGN title, as well.

The ability to link iPhone games to one of the internet's top social networking websites has the potential to bring the iPhone gaming community together in a whole new way.  Seeing what games your friends' are playing and how they're besting your score on your favorite game–in a place you visit daily anyway–should add a nice element of competition to titles that support the new service.

GarageGames, a technology provider for independent developers around the world, has recently announced the addition of iPhone support for its Torque game engine.

With eight years of development and hundreds of games under its belt, the Torque Game Engine is the engine that shook up the industry. Large commercial companies like Vivendi love TGE because its quality and feature set rival engines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Successful indie studios like Pocketwatch Games choose TGE because they can make a great game and never pay a dime in royalty fees. Even research institutions like NASA use TGE because they can quickly prototype large-world simulations.

iPhone developers can now utilize Torque's 2D and 3D toolsets for game development.  Torque for iPhone is based on the the company's Torque Game Engine and Torque Game Builder and provides a complete game development platform for the device.

Torque for iPhone allows the creation of iPhone games on a PC and includes a WYSIWYG realtime editor, integration with various 3D modeling packages, a scripting language, and iPhone-specific functionality such as: multi-touch input support, touch screen gesture recognition, iPhone optimized texture compression, and advanced character and shape animations.

As Inside Mac Games reports, GarageGames is very excited to be supporting Apple's new mobile games platform.

"We've already seen enormous interest in the iPhone within the Torque community. Game developers want to make games for the iPhone and this is a natural step since we're already a very good choice for developing OSX games," said Brett Seyler, GarageGames VP of Business Development. "Apple has been great to work with in the past and the very polished iTunes Store as a marketplace for games should encourage developers to continue pushing boundaries on the iPhone without worrying about the usual publishing and distribution difficulties involved in making a successful mobile game."

A sample of titles created with Torque:

• Marble Blast Ultra (XBOX 360)
• Screwjumper! (XBOX 360)
• Protothea (Wii)
• Dreamlords (PC)
• Blockland (PC)

With the launch of the iTunes App Store and the arrival of "iPhone 2.0" just days away, the buzz surrounding the many games that will make their debut when the store goes live is growing louder and louder.  The previews we've seen over the past few months leave no room for doubt that the iPhone is an extremely capable gaming device and that we will see some very solid titles available on launch day.  Given this, we thought it a particularly good time to have a look at just what makes the iPhone thusly capable.

There has been much coverage of the rich Software Development Kit (SDK) Apple has made available, at no cost, to developers.  The Cocoa programming environment with its collection of robust frameworks and APIs–not the least of which is OpenGL ES–gives developers an elegant and powerful way to interact with the iPhone hardware.  Less has been said, however, about the hardware itself.  What gear gives the iPhone its game?

The iPhone's core system-on-a-chip (SoC) hardware is a Samsung S5L8900.  Being a SoC, the device consists of various discrete components that have been integrated into a single device in order to provide a wide range of functionality in a small, low-cost package.  Two components are of particular importance in quantifying such a device's ability to function as a game platform: the processor core and the graphics hardware.

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The iPhone packs a rather notable punch when it comes to CPU horsepower for a mobile computing device of its size and class.  The 620MHz Xscale-based ARM core in its chipset is no slouch–in fact it's one of if not the most powerful extremely-low-wattage mobile processor out there.  But, that's not to say that the iPhone is up to any and every computer gaming challenge.

Here, we look to the work of an Intel research group in Israel that is striving to develop technologies to allow mobile devices of modest power to run graphically tasking applications such as heavyweight MMORGPs like World of Warcraft and Second Life. 

Second Life and World of Warcraft are among the most prominent MMOGs. They demand lots of computing power – both from the CPU and Graphics. These demands overload any mobile device of today or near future, even including MIDs. By the time the mobile clients have caught up, the performance requirements for MMOGs will grow higher yet.

The 3D Streaming technology developed by Comverse and Intel computes and renders the MMOG content on a powerful backend server, then smartly compresses and streams the graphics onto a client. A network gateway designed by Comverse allows streaming over both WiMAX and 3G cellular networks. With advanced software optimizations including SSE usage, a single Xeon 5400 backend system can serve simultaneously up to 14 clients.

A demonstration video featuring Alexander Sterkin, Sr. SW Application Engineer in Intel’s Software & Solutions Group–but not featuring the iPhone or iPod touch, explains the project further.
 

This is an interesting technology to follow that may enable the iPhone or iPod touch to act as clients to games and applications more demanding than the platform would normally allow.

This year's 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off with the launch of the iPhone 3G and demos of a number of new iPhone and iPod Touch games. We were hoping that Apple would finally provide some solid details on the exact launch of the iTunes App Store and also release developers from the somewhat vaguely termed Non Disclosure Agreement which accompanies the SDK.

During the keynote, however, Steve Jobs never gave an exact date for the launch of the iTunes App Store, but did say the iPhone 2.0 Firmware would be released in "early July". The iTunes App Store has always been one of the major features of the 2.0 Firmware, so we should expect the app store launch at that time.

We've been told the App Store is still undergoing active development so Apple may not even know when the final version will be ready.

Also, there's been reports that the latest 2.0 Firmware is "locked down like no phone has ever been." So, Jailbreaking is currently out of the question.

Once the iTunes App Store launches, we suspect the popularity of Jailbreaking will decline, but some apps (such as emulators) will have to remain outside of the official App Store due to restrictions placed by Apple.

A developer behind the iPhone port of the FPS classic DOOM recently spoke out regarding the port project as well as iPhone development in general.

Developer Psychochromatic explains: “Looking at the hardware specs, I knew iPhone would be able to play a simple game like Doom no problem as it was open-source and already ran on the click-wheel iPod running Linux. I knew Stepwhite, who I work with on Mac projects, and as he'd just bought himself an iPhone and was working with the unofficial tool-chain I jokingly told him he had one week to port Doom to iPhone, and all it had to do was run; he didn't have to implement controls. One week later, he proudly linked me to his Doom port homepage.”

The first build of Doom saw 15,000 downloads on the project site alone, even without a way to control the game. Once controller input had been included that version received over 25,000 downloads.

Behind the ease of development lies the iPhone’s inherent support for a full scale OS. “The iPhone runs OS X. It's a full UNIX system in your pocket, with brilliant Objective-C frameworks that make coding beautiful and powerful applications a dawdle,” explains Psychochromatic.

Psychocromatic is not the first developer to expound the virtues of the iPhone's rich, versatile, open development environment.  While writing iPhone apps was once a challenge, Apple's release of the free iPhone SDK has made such projects "trivial."

Apple's iTunes App Store launches in June and the list of games that will be available at launch grows daily.  Stay tuned to keep up to date on just what download to expect on launch day.

Apple has just posted the fourth beta version of the iPhone SDK for download.  Among other improvements, this release brings the notable inclusion of OpenGL ES support in the iPhone simulator.  Developers can now test, tune, and debug their OpenGL ES code with ease, which is great news for the millions of us anxiously clutching our iPhones in anticipation of the June launch of the iTunes App Store.

OpenGL ES (OpenGL for Embedded Systems) is defined and promoted by the Khronos Group, an industry consortium interested in open graphics and multimedia APIs.

OpenGL® ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform API for full-function 2D and 3D graphics on embedded systems – including consoles, phones, appliances and vehicles. It consists of well-defined subsets of desktop OpenGL, creating a flexible and powerful low-level interface between software and graphics acceleration. OpenGL ES includes profiles for floating-point and fixed-point systems and the EGL™ specification for portably binding to native windowing systems. OpenGL ES 1.X is for fixed function hardware and offers acceleration, image quality and performance. OpenGL ES 2.X enables full programmable 3D graphics.

OpenGL ES is the official graphics API of the Symbian OS and Android mobile platforms and is also supported by the Playstation 3.