An interview with Mark Szymczyk, author of the first new Mac game programming book to be published in years, was posted earlier this week at iDevGames. While the book is still in the preliminary stages of development, it is hoped the writing will be complete by September and it will be published by Prima Publishing later in the fall. In the interview Szymczyk offers an outline of his table of contents, notes that he will be using Carbon for most of the book's examples (for compatibility with OS 9 and OS X), and talks about why he's not covering 3D topics. Here's an excerpt:

Will OpenGL be discussed at all?

Here is where I may disappoint some people. I am not going to be using OpenGL in the book. When I was writing my proposal I made a wish list of topics which included 3D graphics, networking, artificial intelligence, joystick support, physics and audio. As I went into more detail about what I wanted to cover in 3D graphics, I realized that 3D graphics would take up virtually the entire book. I had a choice: focus on 3D graphics and barely cover the other topics; or 2D graphics with more in-depth discussion of the other topics.

I chose to go with the latter and provide greater detail in the "core" gaming areas. It was a tough choice but I figured that there were more books on the market covering OpenGL and 3D graphics than books covering Macintosh sound, multi-platform networking, artificial intelligence and physics.

iDevGames Interview with Mark Szymczyk

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