Oolong, SIO2 or commercial Game engine for 3D iPhone Games newbie?

Question

I\'m trying to pick between the Oolong and SIO2 iPhone game engines for my first game programming project. I have some Cocoa experience and many years of C++ including relat

Answer 1

I started my first SIO2 app last night and it was easy to get up & running from the tutorials (the tutorials include a full XCode project that you can load and start hacking on). The tutorial projects are also very well commented - this makes it quicker to pick up.

The interfaces to SIO2 are mostly in C, so your C++ background should make that transition pretty easy.

Even if you don't use it, download SIO2 and open one of the tutorials and check out the comments & code. You'll be able to tell pretty quickly if it's a toolkit & style you like.

Not directly related to speed of uptake, but a big plus for me was the Blender integration. It lets me use a free 3d toolkit to make & export models and then go from there. I saw that Oolong uses 3DS and I'm not sure if Blender exports that format or not so I could be wrong.

If you're curious: SIO2 provides a python script that exports the Blender scene to a zip file. Then, from inside the SIO2 code you reference your objects from the scene and pull them in to your iPhone app.

Answer 2

I try both OOLong and Unity way. I suggest to use unity:

• Learn Curve is very short if you have a basic game background
• Unity include a large set of utility outer of 'graphics & audio'
• With unity you don't care about graphics/audio file format
• One code for both iOs and Android
• Full set of pre-assembled asset free from the store
• Exendible editor to make your level-editor

I spend one year to close a OOLong project. I probably would have saved six months of work with unity.