Pangea Software Inc. is taking a break from its usual schedule of releasing Macintosh-only games, to teach developers interested in learning how to program games for the Macintosh. The company plans to release ” Pangea Software’s Ultimate Game Programming Guide for Mac OS X ” by the end of October.
Written by Pangea President Brian Greenstone, creator of Nanosaur, Bugdom, Cro-Mag Rally, Enigmo, Otto Matic and other games, the book covers Mac OS X technologies like HID Manager, OpenGL, OpenAL, Core Graphics, Rendezvous and Quicktime from the perspective of a game developer. It also includes tips for writing Maya plug-ins, stereo 3D rendering, networking, AltiVec optimizations, and copy-protection. An entire chapter is dedicated to marketing and sales strategies for developers planning on publishing their titles themselves.
A companion CD includes sample projects created using Apple’s Xcode environment, including a fully functional Maya file exporter, networking code, Vertex Array Range acceleration, threading and more. All sample projects are written in C, designed for intermediate to advanced programmers. Pangea Software’s Ultimate Game Programming Guide for Mac OS X costs US$49.95, but people who order the book from Pangea’s Web site get a 20 percent discount of $39.95 and free shipping. Further academic discounts are also available.