Are there any game engines for iPhone?

Question

Are there any game engines for iPhone?

Answer 1

Yes. A quick google search shows:

• cocos2d
• Unity
• Oolong Engine
• Torque

And others.

Answer 2

There is an iPhone version of the Torque Game Engine.

There is also:

• The SIO2 Game Engine
• ShiVa
• Unity

Answer 3

The two most popular are probably Oolong and SIO2 but for what it's worth, I recommend you do something like this:

• Sound: use CAF files and apple's own SoundEngine OpenAL wrapper class from the samples (beware, there are memory leaks in the example code you'll need to plug)
• Models: use this wavefront OBJ loader for obj and mtl files exported directly from Blender or Max
• Textures: use Apple's own Texture2D class from the samples (bmp will work, but I recommend png because of the platform optimizations)
• 'Engine' is really just the classes that glue this stuff together. This guy's doxygen seems kind of "textbook". This guy also has a decent example UML too (IMHO).

Personally I think it's all so subjective, you really should write this stuff yourself because it should be architected for the way you need it, not just something written that tries to be everything to everybody.

FYI, our team decided to do everything in Objective-C++, where the core of the game is written in C++ and there is a thin layer of Objective-C on top of it that glues the code to the UI widgets and such things.

Answer 4

The best way to do this is to use Cocos2d or role your own code. The apple sdk does not permit for third party sdk's and you would want to take advantage of the full resources of objective c in xcode anyway. Learn objective c it is not hard and it is getting miserable listening to all the web and javascripters out there trying to find an easy way when it couldn't be easier then Apples own tools.