Hi everyone.

I’m new here. I’m just trying to learn Cocoa, and for my first project I want to make a game (I’m a real game freak). The thing is, I don’t want to use OpenGL and I don’t want it to be 3D – I want to make an old, simple, 2D sprite based game, and I want to do it in Cocoa + ObjC. Thing is, I don’t really know where to start. I can use Quartz with NSView and the likes (I think) but I get the impression this could well be really slow. I’ve seen an example ‘asteroids’ game from http://idevgames.com, and it was really slow using this method.

Can anyone out there lend any insight on which classes I could use to get a fast 2D canvas of some sort?

Thanks…

– NeilHoughton

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I have a story for you, Neil. It has to do with MacZoop (a C++ framework on the Mac), and my desire to make an old-style arcade game, complete with explosions, et cetera.

Well, I’ve still got the code I came up with around. It’s a small set of classes for sprite animation. Gradually, I’ve been trying to port it to Cocoa, but I kind of lost interest (when I made it in MacZoop, I was on an old Mac, and it ran slow which may account for my displeasure with it).

Anyhow, if you want the code, I’ll send it to you. I have some ideas on what should be done to port it to Cocoa, too.

You can contact me at the address on my CocoaDevUsers page.

– RobRix

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I thought I read somewhere someone ported Xox to X or X Server. Xox was a 2d game-kit environment written by Sam Streeper (of BackSpace fame) and had a small following in the NS 3.3 days …

– MikeTrent

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You are not getting that confused with the xonx project? [http://sourceforge.net/projects/xonx/] It is a port of Xfree86 to Darwin. -DerekCramer

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What about the CocoaSpriteKit?

Ittpoi (Infinity-to-the-Power-of-Infinity) has ported a 2D Cocoa game, Aquatomic. Source & binary is to be found at http://www.ittpoi.com

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Why not just use OpenGL in 2D? You don’t have to use 3D features of OpenGL…just keep the camera perpendicular to the “world” and forget about the z coord.