Jungool... the title.

[vapourmile]

Does the name come from some kind of mangle of "Jungle", "Gl", "OO", and "Ghoul"? It's fucking terrible.

[flash]

It is how our fictitious tribes people pronounce 'Jungle' in definition of their home. Their language has a slight northern inflect.  

[vapourmile]

If you're developing iPhone games you might want to take a look at the Corona framework? It's Lua, which you may find a lot less ugly than C++

http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/games/

It's almost everything a game dev would be looking for, it includes a 2D sprite and physics API.

PS. Have you uploaded any video of Jungool to You Tube? I'd like to take a look.

[flash]

Corona looks ok, but after the past couple of years learning and growing to like C++, I would be loave to change language now. We also have our own engine that has been in development by HK prior to Jungool and is constantly expanding, another good reason to stick with C++ and its many wonderful features (and a few irksome ones). The engine we have handles 2d Sprites (and 3d transforms), 3d models (2 formats), audio, input, detection, 2d physics, and just about any function needed.

There are videos on YouTube, one is linked on the home page

[headkaze]

I have looked at some of the popular engines and API's for iPhone and while there are some nice ones out there, most are Objective C based. A language I have come to dislike. I actually started porting my engine into Obj-C but quickly came to hate it and re-write in C++.

Unity 3D is C# script with a C++ back end and while C# is a favourite language of mine we decided to go with C++ since I thought it would be the best high level language for Flash to start with.

Cocos2D is a popular one but again, it's in Objective C and at the time didn't have 3D model support. Sill being in Objective C put me off enough.

The Sparrow Framework is based on Flash which is what my own engine's animation system is based but it's Objective C... and Flash and I both hate the syntax of the language.

I never heard of Corona at the time. It looks okay but I've never coded in Lua before.

I always have concerns about performance using 3rd party engines since they are written to be generic. Jungool was a particularly difficult game to write because the bottleneck on iPhone is almost always fill rate (due to it's tiled-based deferred rendering system) and we had tonnes of 2D textures with large alpha blended areas. If you look at Jungool you will notice the graphics are large layered painted scenes and not made up of tiles and this meant we had to use large compressed textures. So this was a particular challenge for me as my first iPhone game.

So in the end I decided to roll my own engine as I had already written a Direct3D gaming style engine in C# for Windows (called "Blaze") so it was just a matter of porting it to C++ for Jungool. So anyway now we have a pretty solid engine, all in lovely C++, and we are both quite comfortable with it even if it is a bit rough around the edges; it's built to perform. It did mean it took us much longer to get Jungool out there but in the long run it's a benefit to understand the hardware and how to make it perform at its best.

For physics we used Box2D which is pretty standard 2D physics engine used by many games on the iPhone. It was a natural choice for us.

Jungool may not be the greatest name for a game, but we had many of different names being thrown around for quite a while. It ended up being between Jumball and Jungool and I was voting for Jumball incase we ever decided to do a sequel. Jungool ended up being voted as the best by the team and I have to agree it was the best choice looking back with hindsight.

[flash]

Great, now I feel a bit ill on Sunday morning, Someone mentioned,

"Objective C"

[Zzaped!]

Jungool is a fine title. Can't see the point of the original post, and how do you make an account without seeing the embedded video on the top page?

I call troll, but as to what it's after ...

Lua is simple, C-based,no pointer problems, allocation problems, etc., but interpreted, so suited to background control and not the real-time action of a good game.

[spacefractal]

I have never tried LUA, but if you ask me, its often used for scripting objects in the in-game, and not as a general programmering language. Here its should been really good.

We did have a another title to start with, but sadly its was copyrighted by a boardgame and later released with the same name on the AppStore. Its was a great name, but we could not use it (hence I want shown which title it was), and voted for Jungool. Yes its a little strange name, but I do really like! No need to change that.

[flash]

It was

"Triball"

See, I just had to let it out...

Actually, I have grown accustomed to "Jungool" now.

[Zzaped!]

Lua is a great tool, C-like, simplified, bonus being easy access to symbols in C object code, so direct function calls, changes to variables & so on.

It is ssslllooowww compared to object code.

The sequencer programme Cells DS is a good example. All of the sequence parameters and behaviours (including response to button presses and touching the screen), and the display are defined in Lua, and those parts are user-programmable. Compiled C++, closed to the user, handles the actual sample playback, event detection, screen drawing, etc. Nice design.

Problem: The programmer notes that it can't handle small (really small, less than 10 x 10) two-D arrays quickly enough to run e.g. a cellular automaton sequencer.

Can see how the Lua-centric framework would work, hardly essential for the team.

[Zzaped!]

It was

"Triball"

See, I just had to let it out...

Actually, I have grown accustomed to "Jungool" now.

Problem with Triball is the lack of any connection with threes.

[spacefractal]

Its was shorted from "tribe ball"... But a company allready World trademarked and even releases the board game to iOS. So nothing we could do.

[vapourmile]

Having tried many computer languages my conclusion is they're all pretty hopeless.

[Zzaped!]

  Duh, product of how computers work. Which language did you find most interesting?

[flash]

Having tried many computer languages my conclusion is they're all pretty hopeless.

Write your own bloody language then?

You start this topic (other than belittling the title of the game) mentioning that Corona + Lua is good and then lambast languages in general. Also, after all this time you never replied the the final post?

Honestly!!!

[spacefractal]

haha. its was a 3.5 year thread, just because im bumped up this game again. Its was just long time ago, and now playing with my Mogo controller (and finally got it to work with CatchOut today).

[flash]

Yes. I was just doing a casual jaunt through some of the old threads spurred on by your mention of Jungool. Lol