Now, this raises questions about what is going on with Crown and Cutlass and how Broad Shoulder Development will relate to the Crown and Cutlass project.  We don’t have all the details ironed out, but really this is just a way for us to focus our development efforts.  None of the Crown and Cutlass source will be closed, none of the artwork licenses will change.  Unfortunately, in order to recover the cost of Apple’s developer program and other business expenses, we are planning to charge for the iPhone games we develop.  We will have to see exactly how this works out, but we’d like to do something along the lines of Ogre’s dual-license (perhaps GPL?) with commercial support.

Our current 2D iPhone engine is really a port of the work we did for Protocce, our new Crown and Cutlass engine.  We have simplified a lot due to the hardware restrictions, but I’m hoping that we can use the experience we gain actually using the engine on the iPhone to improve Crown and Cutlass itself.  As I said, we would love to get a version of Crown and Cutlass running on the iPhone too.  While the gameplay might have to be rethought a little, I think that would be very doable and really fun to play!  Anyway, all that is to say, we are branching out and trying some new stuff, but don’t worry Crown and Cutlass isn’t going away.

Anyway, the other day, I shut my laptop so it went to sleep, put it in my bag, and ate lunch. After lunch, I opened the lid and found that my keyboard and trackpad no longer worked. I tried rebooting, etc. and even a workaround that I found on the apple support forums, but nothing made any difference. I was pretty sure it was hardware, since I couldn’t even get the a boot menu for bootcamp. I managed to find a USB keyboard and mouse on campus, and confirm that the system still worked otherwise.

I was near an apple store, so I just ran over there and had one of their “geniuses” look at it. That name kills me, but I think it’s just a part of the sort of smug apple culture. My “genius” was helpful, but all he did was confirm it didn’t work. He didn’t seem at all surprised so I don’t think this is a rare issue. Apparently, a keyboard firmware update was supposed to prevent this from happening, but I had it installed and it didn’t do me any good.

They ordered me a new keyboard and trackpad, and I kept my laptop until it came in, so I only had to be without my computer for a day once the part got there.  After that it worked fine for a few weeks.  However, it has stopped working again.  At first, I would be using the trackpad and somehow OS X would think I was trying to eject the CD drive so I’d see the eject icon on the screen.  A little while after that, I would get a kernel panic with a stack trace in the trackpad driver.  From there, it just kind of slowly degraded to not working at all.  For a little while, it worked in XP but not OS X, but now it doesn’t work in either OS.  That means I get to have another appointment to see a genius this week.

That is pretty inconvienient.  I am trying to do work on campus this summer for a research project, but I can’t when my keyboard isn’t working.  I also need to be able to VPN in to work in case an issue comes up, but again, I can’t do that without my laptop working.  I thought Macs were supposed to be wonderful pieces of hardware (and that was why I paid extra for it), but after talking to the Mac owners I know it seems like almost every one of them has had to have their system replaced at least once since they got it.  Maybe we are all witless users who screw up our systems so badly they can’t be salvaged.  However, I never had these sorts of issues with my old Dell.  I am pretty disappointed in Apple at the moment…

I really have not quite gotten used to the way the filesystem is arranged. I guess I am comfortable with it not being like Windows, but I want it to be like linux. In Windows, there is no “/usr/lib/” or “/usr/local/lib/” for libraries so you put them somewhere else (like “C:\OgreSDK” or in program files or something). In OS X there is a “/usr/lib/” and “/usr/local/lib/” but it looks like the preferred place to install libraries is into “/Libraries/” which is just weird. Which should I use? Should I treat it as a unix machine, or embrace the weird OS X stuff?

The keyboard also is a little annoying. I want a “home” and an “end” key. I want a “del” key that is separate from the backspace key. I guess you can do “command-right” to get to the end of the line, but that does not seem to work consistently in all applications. I also really think only putting one mouse button on the laptops is a poor decision. And no, I don’t buy the argument that using modifier keys for things like that or to get a right-click is somehow more efficient.

I am also trying to figure out how to get dependencies for Protocce installed. Ogre was really easy since they provide a framework. If I remember correctly from his blog, Steve Streeting got a Mac recently so OS X has a higher priority on the Ogre team. The ogg and vorbis packages came with XCode projects to make frameworks, so building and installing them was really easy. I couldn’t find a binary boost distribution, so I built/installed it just like I would have in linux (“./configure && make && make install”). That is what boost recommends, but I’m not sure that is the OS X way to do things. At this point though, I don’t think there is reason to go through the trouble of making a framework (and really figuring out what frameworks are all about, how they differ from bundles, what a bundle is, etc.). Unfortunately, OS X support in CEGUI seems to be lagging behind. CEGUI seems to be kind of quiet lately anyway (Crazy Eddie appears to have left the project, hopefully it can rise from the ashes and continue strongly eventually). I am going to try building it from SVN where I hope the OS X support is a little better.

XCode seems like it will be nice. I need to try a “hello world” project in it, but it looks like CMake can generate XCode projects. That will be save a lot of work, since it will shield me from having to set up a project manually until after I see how Xcode handles projects a little. I’m sure it’ll still take some getting used to, but I’m interested to see how it compares to Eclipse with the CDT and Visual Studio.

Anyway, if you have tips on getting started with development is OS X, let me know. I found Apple’s getting started page and it seems there could be some good stuff in there., but I have a lot to learn.