At its World Wide Developer Conference event in San Francisco, California on Monday, 2 June 2014, Apple officially announced the new version of its mobile operating system, iOS 8.
The updated mobile operating system boasts a number of new features for gamers and developers alike.
An interesting announcement was slipped in – Apple is eschewing the OpenGL application programming interface (API) in favour of its own API named Metal.
In its press material, Apple says that Metal “maximizes the performance of the A7 chip and Swift, a powerful new programming language.” They add, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically, that “Metal enables leading game providers for the first time to bring console-class 3D games to mobile devices.”
The Metal API ties in neatly with the rest of Apple’s game development ecosystem.
iOS 8 now features SceneKit, which is basically Apple’s 3D engine, allowing developers to interact with device hardware through the Metal API for rendering 3D.
SceneKit was first put to use on Apple’s desktop OS X operating system, and so having it on mobile devices means easy porting of 3D games between the two.
On the 2D engine front, Apple already added their SpriteKit back in iOS 7, and iOS 8 now boasts improvements to SpriteKit, including field forces, per-pixel physics, and inverse kinematics.
This means Apple can now offer developers a full toolset in order to create games (and apps) for their ecosystem.
Under the hood powering all these potential Apple-ecosystem games: the Apple-designed 64-bit ARM “A7” CPU a dual-core running at 1.3 – 1.4GHz, and a PowerVR G6430. The A7 also supports the OpenGL ES version 3.0 graphics standard.
Apple devices currently using the A7 chipset are iPhone 5S, iPad Air, and iPad Mini (2nd generation).
For an overview of the new iOS 8 features, visit MyBroadband: iOS 8 boasts new features, better graphics
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All I can say is this move is typical of Apple! They try and keep as much in-house as possible. Now their gaming development is in-house with their own development toolkits. I don’t think this is a very smart move. While Apple is popular still, it has lost traction against Samsung and other smaller manufacturers. So game development studios will have to develop purely for the Apple platform, and thus, limit their potential income.