If you've followed us at all you know by now that I like porting to new platforms, at least new platforms that support C++. Every port seems to make the base engine a bit better, and it brings in a few extra bucks to support continued development. With the news of the Mac app store coming soon I had to jump on porting the Golden Hammer engine and Big Mountain Snowboarding to OSX.
Our engine started on Windows, moved to OSX (carbon), then to iPhone/iPad, then to Android. The OSX port was never really finished because the iPhone took off. Carbon is outdated technology (see below), so for the port back to OSX I started over using Cocoa.
The port isn't fully ready for release, but within a week I was able to get the game pretty much working. This was definitely the easiest port so far.
Carbon vs Cocoa (use Cocoa)
OSX supports two different platform layers, Carbon and Cocoa. Carbon is in C, only runs on 32 bit, and does not seem to be fully supported anymore. The Carbon implementation in my engine gets a ton of deprecated code warnings, and there's a Mac App Store requirement that apps not use deprecated technology. I have not seen an official and specific announcement from Apple on Carbon, but to be safe it's better to go with Cocoa.
Also, Cocoa is almost a direct equivalent of Cocoa Touch, the API used for iPhone development. There are a few little differences that I'll note in the next section, but for the most part you can make copies of your iPhone platform layer with different includes, fix the compiler errors, and be ready to go.
Cocoa vs Cocoa Touch
As I said, Cocoa is almost exactly like Cocoa Touch. For most of my classes I was able to just make a copy of the iPhone version, add some different frameworks, rename a couple classes and be good.
The frameworks I'm currently using are:
- Cocoa.framework
- OpenGL.framework
- ApplicationServices.framework
- OpenAL.framework
- AudioToolbox.framework
- AppKit.framework
- CoreData.framework
- Foundation.framework
Most UIKit classes have an AppKit equivalent. Instead of UIView, there's NSView. Instead of CGPoint, there's NSPoint. The first line of defense on a compile error is to stick an NS in front of the class name and see if that works.
32 bit vs 64 bit
This probably won't matter to most developers, but Cocoa will compile for 64 bit systems. We're doing some behind the scenes magic with pointers and such, so I had to go through the codebase and replace a bunch of long data types with int32_t and u_int32_t, and remove some of the more questionable pointer code.
OpenGL vs OpenGL ES
For a first pass implementation, you can think of OpenGL as a near direct equivalent to OpenGL ES1. This is a horrible simplification, and I fear a lot of OpenGL users coming at me with pitchforks for saying it. A better way to think of it is ES1 is almost a direct subset of the full OpenGL, and you can get ES1 code running on OpenGL pretty easily. I have not yet ported our ES2 shader code, so I can't comment much on that aspect.
The includes you want are:
- #include "OpenGL/gl.h"
- #include "OpenGL/glu.h"
Make a copy of your ES1 implementation, change the includes, and hit compile. You will get a ton of compile errors. Most of them are easy to fix. For any function or variable that has "OES" at the end of it, simply delete the OES part. For any function named something like "glFrustumf", delete the "f". This will take care of 99% of the compile errors.
I'm not quite 100% sure, but I don't think PVR4 support is available. If I'm wrong on this let me know! It would save me some work. Right now I just have uncompressed textures, but DXT support seems to be available for use.
OSX Input
Modern macs support multitouch through the touchpad. The gotcha is that the mouse needs to be over the window in order for the app to receive any touch events. I'm planning on supporting keyboard inputs for those without a touchpad, and making the game fullscreen so we can always get the touch events.
You'll want the following functions in your NSView:
- (void)mouseMoved:(NSEvent *)theEvent
- (void)mouseDragged:(NSEvent *)theEvent
- (void)mouseEntered:(NSEvent *)theEvent
- (void)mouseExited:(NSEvent *)theEvent
- (void)mouseDown:(NSEvent *)theEvent
- (void)mouseUp:(NSEvent *)theEvent
- (void)keyDown:(NSEvent *)theEvent
- (void)keyUp:(NSEvent *)theEvent
- (void)touchesBeganWithEvent:(NSEvent *)event
- (void)touchesMovedWithEvent:(NSEvent *)event
- (void)touchesEndedWithEvent:(NSEvent *)event
- (BOOL)acceptsFirstResponder { return YES; }
You'll also want to call these somewhere:
[window setAcceptsMouseMovedEvents:YES];
[view setAcceptsTouchEvents:YES];
Additional platform considerations
The straight port of snowboarding runs at 2ms/frame on my 13" macbook, or 500fps. This is without making any use of multithreading or doing any real hardcore optimizations anywhere. I think any halfway decent straight port of an iPhone app should run at crazy speeds on a low end Mac.
So is a straight port good enough? I have no idea and neither will anyone else really until the Mac App Store has been out a while. Is it competing with Steam and games like Half Life 2, or will the audience want smaller simple games? Can't tell yet! I'm exporting higher res maps and doing something in the middle.
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