Engines

By example files do you mean those that came with the framework or that project (called Sapus Tongue) that you can purchase?

 

If you were going to make a 2d game(a td game) which engine would be the best and easiest to use?

 

As a few of have said cocos2d is definately good but it probably depends on your experience... it's probably no good for beginners as it tends to be a bit self-help. Otherwise I would recommend it But that's the only one I've used so maybe you want to try out some of the others mentioned in this thread first?

 

For Days of Thunder and Top Gun I rolled up an engine from scratch. I never like reinventing wheels, IMO, code should only have to be written once, but I've tried adopting an engine more than once (for Mac development previously, and again for iPhone) and every time I end up feeling more limited by what the engine CAN'T do than relieved by what it CAN. Plus, I always have an idea of how I would solve a problem, and if an engine does it a different way, I get kind of turned off to it.

That said, Unity3D is really cool. I've used it a couple times for Mac/Windows development and it's really powerful, really easy to get into, and it hides the nasty technical side of the 3D engine allowing you to focus purely on the creative side of things. I haven't used it for iPhone yet, but I've seen other people use it with a lot of success, and their games are really awesome. For 2D it might be overkill, but (really fun) 2D games have been done with it.

 

I tried jumping into Torque for Mac development a few times. Their 3D engine was simply a huge pile of code, and I completely failed to wrap my head around it, even after flipping through books devoted to the thing. I gave up on it pretty quickly. Their 2D game builder was much more usable, and has a very cool system for giving behaviors to objects and seemed like a good parallel to Unity for 2D stuff. Again, this was for the Mac almost 2 years ago so I don't know what's been improved since then for iPhone.

Also, I had no idea SDL had been ported... it's not an engine really but it handles a lot of the low-level windowing and event handling in a completely cross-platform way. I've used it in every Mac game I've written and I love it. Anyone have any first hand experience with it for iPhone?

 

We use Unity on our end as well. It was a bit of a learning curve for our team as they all came out of console development but we are excited about continuing our use in the future. That being said we are also using a customized engine for our next title as one of our developers came to the team with it.

One note is we hit a massive memory leak late in development and Unity support came through with a new build within 2 hours (while we went lunch, Huzzah!). We were pretty happy with them over that.

 

I'm using Unity as well. I'm doing development on the side and simply don't have the time to write my own engine.

 

Wow that is some impressive support!!

 

Hi Justin,

Just wondering if you had considered SIO2 at all? it is open source and is a pretty good 3D engine for the iDevice...I like it a lot so far but am a C guy so that suits me well...Nice integration with bullet physics too...
http://sio2interactive.com/TECHNOLOGY.html

 

To be honest, I didn't know Sio2 was out there at all until I read this thread. It seems to be a good all-in-one solution but since my first experience with Torque I've always been a little leary about the Pile Of Code type engines. Out of those, though, it looks like one of the better ones. I'd personally rank it third behind rolling a custom engine and using Unity.

 

Yes I can understand. SIO2 is open source which is great as you can indeed expand on it or/and make code changes to the engine if needs be.
It is well documented with tutorials and the code is well written, really.
The integration with blender is awesome, too. I also like the fact the engine is pure C but also support LUA for the people who need scripting hooks/interface.

 

I ended up using my own game engine. I had one I made on the PC, I just had to convert it to the iPhone, which wasn't too hard. So if you have stuff working on the PC, it's not that hard to get working on the iPhone (assuming you are using OpenGL).

Actually I can run the game on PC and iPhone without much issues. Some of the physics needs adjustment, I haven't looked into that. Other than that it's cool.

Jeff.
http://www.pigskinpass.net

 

I just meant the sample code that comes with the framework; one big xcode project with several targets, one for each example. The Sapus Tongue source would be a great resource for someone that wanted to see a completed project, but I didn't need it.

 

I'm using cocos2d for my game (in sig hopefully, this is the first post I've made here). It's pretty nice after you figure out the basic flow of building scenes, moving sprites, etc. The main developer of the library is very active on the help forums, as well. Many games have been made with cocos2d, including Stick Wars. See the current list:

http://code.google.com/p/cocos2d-iphone/wiki/GamesUsingCocos2d