After completing the book “Game Programming All In One” as a tutorial on game development — review coming soon. I’ve been evaluating my options for moving forward. As simple as the Allegro Framework made learning the basics of game programming, I was not entirely happy with the performance that it gave me on the Mac and not entirely pleased with the overall feeling that it was primarily targetting Windows and the other platorms were later added.
I have no idea if the developers conciously did this, but the idea of using graphics content in the Windows bmp format for my game content doesn’t sit well. Especially, since Objective-C and Cocoa have plenty of image manipulation functionality of their own using newer and more Mac friendly formats. The drawing routines seem to be rather slow, I’m not sure what the framework uses under the hood, but I believe that I can get better performance directly using CoreGraphics and definitely using OpenGL.
I did find that there are several plugins to the framework that would add the functionality and possibly the performance I’m looking for. For example there is a plugin to allow for the use of JPEG images and also a complete OpenGL framework plugin. The problem with these is that they are not part of the main Allegro framework and would require two more individual builds and would represent at least two more libraries that I have to constantly monitor for updates and patches.
Given my desire to target the Mac and the benefits of using XCode and Objective-C when it comes to a smooth transition to MacTel or x86Mac or whatever it will be called, I believe my choice has been made.
Also, I have created a page dedicated specifically to my Project Plan which should make it much easier for me to update and for anyone interested to follow along.
So, now that this step can be marked complete, I venture forth in to the wilds of the “Write a Design Document” step.