Oolong (formerly iGDK) iPhone games development engine now closed source

Posted by dennis on January 5th, 2008 at 02:16pm Comments

In an interesting development from both iPhone gaming and iPhone programming worlds, the creator of the iGDK (iPhone Game Development Kit), an ambitious project meant to facilitate creation and porting of games to the iPhone and iPod Touch, decided to make it closed source as opposed to open source GNU version 3 license under which it was previously available.

As a result iGDK was renamed to The Oolong Engine (according to the creator named after his favorite brand of tea, if anyone tried that). The new project page is now available at oolongengine.com and from the sounds of it the project will become commercial.

And it’s no wonder, considering the stated final features (and keeping in mind that Apple will soon release the official iPhone SDK which will open it to the mainstream retail games industry, while the big games industry players didn’t make their move yet).

Core
o OpenGL ES 1.1 support with extension handling
o Math library that supports fixed-point and floating-point calculations with an interface very similar to the D3D math library
o Support for numerous texture formats including the PowerVR 2-bit, 4-bit and normal map compression formats (hardware support for those is not exposed so far)
o Support for PowerVR’s POD (Scene and Meshes) and the 3DS files formats
Input
o Touch screen support

Camera
o Polar camera model (as a template to implement something more complex)

Font and Icon rendering

Utility Functions
o Logging functionality that stores the file name, source line, time and the log entry in a file
o Memory Manager supports
- Heap walking
- Memory pools (generic / non-generic)
- Memory bookmarks
- Hierarchical heaps
- Memory leak detection
o Timing: several functions that can replace rdstc, QueryPerformance etc.
o Profiler: industry proven in-game profiler

Resources
o Resource streaming system

Planned features:
o Render target support
o More advanced camera models
o Input manager
o Portal system
o kd-tree support
o DOOM III map file format support

Once and if all these features are implemented, it seems like creating interesting games for the iPhone will become much easier. So could Apple iPhone become the new PSP or DS? You can still vote on this topic in our poll — although you might want to hurry up, as it will be closing soon (link).

Related posts:

1. Cube: open source FPS games engine soon on your iPhone?
2. Unity engine to bring 3D games to the iPhone - beta support program now open
3. Mobile Games: Why iPhone Shouldn’t Remain A Closed Platform
4. iTorque iPhone games development studio comes in different versions
5. Java ME tools for iPhone games developers. Private beta registrations now open!

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Filed Under: News+ Tech News+ iPhone Games+ iPhone News+ iPhone Programs

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