Yep that’s right, Marmalade 7.3.1 is smoking hot and fresh off the press. In case you have been developing games in a cave somewhere with no internet connection the Marmalade SDK is an awesome piece of technology that enables you to create games that run across many different mobile and desktop platforms with “one single code base”. I cannot stress how wonderful that is in mere words. You can develop products in C++, Objective-C, Lua or HTML / JavaScript, test under simulation on Mac / Windows desktop, deploy to device / store and whole raft of other cool stuff.
Anyways, sales pitch aside, lets take a look at some of the recent changes:
- Fortumo now integrated with IwBilling and Quick Billing.
- New FBX to Marmalade converter tool, making it easy to get your 3D assets from tools such as Maya LT, 3ds Max and others that support FBX format into Marmalade.
- ideviceinstaller now available on Windows (goodbye iTunes!).
- IwGx now supports the ETC2 and EAC compressed texture formats.
- IwGx PowerVR texture compression efficiency improved.
- Initial support for PowerVR Tools (PVRTrace and PVRTune) on Windows Desktop.
I’m majorly excited about three of the new features in particular. The first is the support for Fortumo integration into IwBilling and QBilling. If you don’t know what they are then they are a single unified solution that enables you to “very easily” add in-app purchasing to your app across multiple different app stores. The addition of Fortumo means that in-app purchases can now be accepted by a vast number of different app stores (Android in particular).
Second feature is not having to install apps to an iOS device using the infinitely despised iTunes client on PC. I have never come across such a bug ridden piece of software in all my years. I will be happy to be deploying directly to device from now on!
Lastly, a new FBX converter that converts Maya LT exported FBX files into a lovely Marmalade format, yummy yummy.
By the way, did I mention that the Marmalade SDK is now available on a FREE license!
Click here to download the latest version of the Marmalade SDK