I’m working on another post related to my efforts on finding useful frameworks and tools chains to use in my classes and independent game development here in Athens, GA. That is a longer post, but this seemed important enough to be its own post. I recently found the Popcap Developer Framework, which for independent 2D game development looks really exciting. It is my understanding that this framework was used in the development of games like World of Goo and of course many of Popcap’s games. What a boon to the community I thought! Then I clicked the download button, which sends me the following message:
Forbidden
You do not have access to this page.
You must be logged in to developer.popcap.com before downloading files
To which I dutifully clicked the “Register” link, which returns the following:
Sorry, registration has been disabled by the administrator.
I’ve sent several messages through the “contact us” link with no reply. I have found the alternative Tuxcap port of the library, but it is a little sad to see such a great community boon lost to the non-responsive industry ether that pervades in many cases. Of course I can’t ask the question on the Popcap developer forum because registration is closed. Thus I cry my tears into the Internet ether.
Read this: http://developer.popcap.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5829
It’s about popcap and what happened.
I recommend instead http://www.phelios.com/ptk/
What is PTK?
PTK is a game engine, also called a SDK (Software Development Kit) that helps you make your own games easily. PTK is a multi-platform 2D game engine with 3D capabilities built around OpenGL or Direct 3D accelerated hardware, however, it is also possible to create 3D multi platform games with OpenGL.
I’ve checked out and downloaded PTK. I like what I see so far. Thanks for the pointer. I’m also pretty enamored with IndieLib at the moment, though doing the OS X port isn’t all that much fun so far.
PopCap put the framework on SourceForge.net
Here is the link at SourceForge.net, it is as follows http://sourceforge.net/projects/popcapframework/
From Morgan
What happened to PopCap? I clcik on the link and there’s nothing there.