Keep in mind that the iPhone hardware isn’t that impressive, after you’ve been playing with PC’s. It will render triangles, a few of them at least, but certainly not the lush scenes you’re used to. Look at the existing 3-d iPhone apps–most of them have very limited 3-d geometry, just a few hundred polys or so in the foreground, and then a lot of flats in the background. Still, it will be fun to play with.
Note that an iPod touch might be a less expensive purchase option than a full iPhone.
But I wonder if it would not have any legal issues. I’ve read some where around - I don’t remember - that some game engines which deploys for iPhone, and run on platforms that not Mac, might be sued by Apple… well, i hope it not be true, but is better check it out.
Well, it’s possible to develop for iPhone from Linux (I’m sure also Windows) but I don’t know if it’s then possible to send to your iPhone without jailbreaking it.
Oh, it is? I thought it said Intel Mac OSX only on the site. That must mean only the tools, or I would’ve tried to get it for my PPC Mac or Windows. However, if you can use it on Windows, that would be amazing. Are you sure Apple supports it on Windows, or is it just ported over by someone? Oh, and you win an award for fastest reply to a post I have ever seen. Like, I wouldn’t even have time to find the post in the amount of time it took you to respond.
There’s a lot of misinformation and confusion on this subject.
There are two ways to develop for the IPhone. The first way is to use Apple’s official IPhone SDK, which is the only way to get your app distributed via Apple’s App Store. It is also the only way to get your app onto a non-jailbroken IPhone. This official SDK does indeed run on Intel Mac only. It also costs you $99 per year, for the right to ship your compiled apps onto your (or anyone else’s) IPhone.
Or you can jailbreak your IPhone and use the open-source toolchain, or some combination of open-source tools of your choice. Once the IPhone is jailbroken, you can use gcc to compile for it and then ship your apps to the phone via ssh and scp. This pipeline works from Linux, Windows, PPC Macs, or just about anything you’ve got. You can even compile directly on the IPhone itself.
Legal issues with the latter pipeline are murky, of course. You can find lots of people on the internet–none of them lawyers–enthusiastically espousing arguments for and against jailbreaking. For myself, I will remain neutral on the topic.
So, then I couldn’t use this IPhone support with the official SDK and release my game on the app store even if I’m on an Intel Mac? Or is there any way that this could be supported using Python?
I do plan to support the official SDK using this, so you’ll be able to develop in Panda using Python, then distribute your app on the App Store. But, you’ll need to have an Intel Mac, and pony up the $99.
We can also support the open-source toolchain, for the rest of you.
Huh, I don’t know that it matters that much. The particular version of SDK used to compile the engine is surely the smallest part of this whole porting effort. Most of the stuff that Panda brings to the table is outside of the realm of the SDK, anyway–Panda is a 3-D graphics engine, while the SDK and its Frameworks provide fundamentally 2-D operations. If you’re programming in Panda, you probably won’t be using most of the UIKit operations, unless you go out of your way to call them directly (for instance, by using PyObjC or some such).
You could, of course, write your own Objective-C app using the full SDK and all of its interfaces, and also link with Panda to use Panda’s operations only when it suited you. Then you would largely be writing your own app using Apple’s SDK, and using Panda incidentally; and it would be completely up to you which version of the SDK you used.
But, if you wrote an app entirely in Python and Panda, you wouldn’t really see any of the SDK directly.
Depends on how intrepid you are, I suppose. You could actually download Panda from the cvs tree and build it yourself (using a special iPhone build configuration), and run Panda3D apps on your phone today. But for a fully-supported turnkey solution, you’ll need to wait at least for the 1.7 release, which is not yet scheduled but will hopefully happen within a few months.
(In addition to the publish itself, there’s also a little more work that still needs to be done in the codebase to make it a complete iPhone solution. Some of this work will overlap with the web plugin effort I’m also working on, so I’ve put the iPhone development temporarily on hold while I continue the web plugin effort full-speed. But the claimed timeframe of a few months still applies.)
Quick reply! …wow, didn’t realise it was that developed? A few months? That’s nothing!
I’m a total noob to all this stuff really, I’ve just been looking for a way of making simple 3D games with my mate who is studying 3D modelling and animation. I looked at Blender but can’t import his 3dsmax models (with animation) properly it seems. I’m learning Python for my web development job, so I looked around and came across Panda! …looks great, and then read this about iPhone deployment, even better!
Sweet, looking forward to it. I’ve already started developing 2D games on iphone, but I already have a couple game concepts I’d really love 3D graphics for.
