OS4 Game Development

[GreggBz]

What are your recommendations for game development on OS4? I need a break, or a change of pace. Visual Studio 2003 is a great IDE but I'm sick of staring at it.

My background is a modest amount of FORTRAN 77 lots of VB .NET / DirectX stuff and Unix scripts (Perl, bash etc..) I'd like to learn C, but would prefer a more high level language to start with. I only program as a hobby really, but I enjoy it.

What are the graphics APIs/Libraries that are available, Warp3D? SDL?

I have 2 things I'd like to port over to OS4, a fractal planet maker (hardest) and a real time 2d combat module (like asteroids, or StarControl, fighting other ships)

[Belial6]

When you start looking for source code to port, you might want to check out this real time 2d combat game.

[GreggBz]

Well I would port a module I'm working on from a game I'm developing here:
http://www.outerspacecrew.net

Do you have source for me to see from a game, is that what you meant?

If so, yea, throw it my way it might help.

[SamuraiCrow]

SDL and OpenGL are a safe bet for AmigaOS 4.x and MorphOS.  Just remember to use the "SDL/endian.h" include when accessing the buffers of any files that have been loaded in so that it can correct the endianness of your PC code.

Just don't use display lists or shaders in your OpenGL code because the MiniGL implementation used by OS 4 doesn't support them.

As for the high-level languages, you may have to wait a while becuase Mattathias Basic hasn't gotten a working object-oriented extension format yet and Python for AmigaOS 4 is buggy and doesn't have the PyGame extension (SDL for Python).  C++ is an option though.