iOS Advice on Porting a Game to iOS (C++/Direct-X)

[vodouman]

I don't mean to hi-jack the thread or anything but I have a similar question:

I am a Computer Games Development student at university in the UK, about to go into my third (final) year. I have been learning C++, OpenGL, DirectX, Python over the past 2 years and wanted to make an iPhone app.

I have spent the past 2 months making a game in Windows using Win32API, OpenGL and C++. I want to make an iPhone version of the game in Obj-C. Just wondering; given my programming knowledge so far will it be pretty easy to jump in and become familiar with the language and XCode suite (coming from Visual Studio '08 + '10).

Contemplating also doing an iPhone game for my third year project too

 

[Hansr]

I don't mean to hi-jack the thread or anything but I have a similar question:

I am a Computer Games Development student at university in the UK, about to go into my third (final) year. I have been learning C++, OpenGL, DirectX, Python over the past 2 years and wanted to make an iPhone app.

I have spent the past 2 months making a game in Windows using Win32API, OpenGL and C++. I want to make an iPhone version of the game in Obj-C. Just wondering; given my programming knowledge so far will it be pretty easy to jump in and become familiar with the language and XCode suite (coming from Visual Studio '08 + '10).

Contemplating also doing an iPhone game for my third year project too

I think this warrants a thread of it's own.

 

[robbieduncan]

I think this warrants a thread of it's own.

Your wish is my command

 

[vodouman]

Thanks for creating a thread of it's own but it wasn't particularly necessary; I gave background to my specific situation however my question was very similar to the one asked in the other thread:

'Just wondering; given my programming knowledge so far will it be pretty easy to jump in and become familiar with the language and XCode suite (coming from Visual Studio '08 + '10).'

Any response is welcomed anyway, just wanted to point that out ^

 

[chown33]

'Just wondering; given my programming knowledge so far will it be pretty easy to jump in and become familiar with the language and XCode suite (coming from Visual Studio '08 + '10).'

How hard or easy was it for you to learn Visual Studio, and the languages you know? Only you can answer that.

Have you ever had to unlearn something in order to correctly learn a new thing, because you'll probably have to unlearn some C++ things in order to learn Objective-C and Cocoa effectively. Two things that immediately come to mind are stack-resident vs. heap-resident (Objective-C only has the latter), and the retain/release approach to memory management in Objective-C.

One way to get the first approximation of an answer is to try an Xcode iOS introductory tutorial and see what makes sense for you.
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhone101/

Here's a more complex example:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#referencelibrary/GettingStarted/Creating_an_iPhone_App/

linked to under "Getting Started" at this page:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/navigation/

Also see:
http://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/

 

[vodouman]

How hard or easy was it for you to learn Visual Studio, and the languages you know? Only you can answer that.

Have you ever had to unlearn something in order to correctly learn a new thing, because you'll probably have to unlearn some C++ things in order to learn Objective-C and Cocoa effectively. Two things that immediately come to mind are stack-resident vs. heap-resident (Objective-C only has the latter), and the retain/release approach to memory management in Objective-C.

One way to get the first approximation of an answer is to try an Xcode iOS introductory tutorial and see what makes sense for you.
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhone101/

Here's a more complex example:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#referencelibrary/GettingStarted/Creating_an_iPhone_App/

linked to under "Getting Started" at this page:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/navigation/

Also see:
http://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/

Thanks for the links, I ended up buying a program I found in the App Store called 'Learn Objective C.' £1.19 I believe, it took me 1 day to get through.

I'm loving it so far, the language seems very similar syntactically to C++; in some cases I think it makes more sense, others not so much

I'm going to cram as much as I can for 1 week then begin work on my game.

BTW, Xcode is AWESOME