WWDC 2014: Apple Announces iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite

A brief look at what this means for gaming and game development

When it comes to Apple news, it doesn’t get much bigger than WWDC. And when it comes to WWDC events, today’s was one of the biggest and most important ones in recent memory, when it comes to software development for Apple platforms. Read on as we unpack some of the gaming-focused features in iOS 8 and OSX Yosemite, and what they mean for Apple, developers, and users.

Metal

This is the big one. Metal is a brand new high-performance 3D graphics framework. It’s multithreaded, optimized for the A7 chip, and designed for combining CPU and GPU processing. It was developed with input from the teams behind Unity and Unreal Engine, and will likely be a major component of future releases of those development environments.

Longer-term, Metal will likely play a significant role in whatever gaming SDK eventually comes to the Apple TV.

Spritekit / Scenekit

Apple’s simpler, more introductory game development environments also received updates and feature additions. While neither of these has received particularly widespread adoption among major cross-platform releases, they’re a great environment for developers focused exclusively on iOS. They’ll also likely play a major role in game development for the Apple TV. Something to watch…

Swift

Swift is a brand new programming language, replacing Objective C as Apple’s preferred language for Mac and iOS development. It’s been a long time coming.

While Swift is likely to be less important for game developers, it will be a major factor in the development of basically all future non-gaming iOS apps.

Xcode 6

Designed to be faster, more polished, and fully integrated with all of the new technologies listed above, Xcode 6 will be incredibly important for app developers. As for users, while they won’t directly see Xcode, a better developer environment means better apps – the effects will be noticeable to everyone.

Cloudkit

CloudKit is a big deal – bigger than the amount of attention it was given during the keynote implies. For the first time, Cloudkit will allow app developers to combine server-side code with iCloud data, and share that code and data between apps and devices. The effects of this could potentially be huge for gaming. Server-side code means persistent worlds, persistent connections between apps, and offline data manipulation behind the scenes. This could potentially even allow completely iCloud native MMORPGs, depending on how Apple implements it. Huge potential here.

App Bundles

This is a two-edged sword, but for better or worse, developers can now bundle multiple apps together and sell them as a collection. On the one hand, it makes it easier for developers to ignite interest in back catalog games that may not be garnering the attention they should. Developers can bundle older apps into a slightly-more-expensive version of the new app and turn them into a way to add a few dollars to the cost of their latest game.

On the other hand, most developers will probably race to find out how many games they can cram into a $.99 package, further reducing the amount gamers will be expecting to pay for quality games. Expect this one to prove controversial among developers.

And lastly…

MFi controller support for OSX

This one didn’t garner a mention at WWDC, but does get a place on Apple’s website. MFi controller support will be officially coming to Mac OSX Yosemite. Hopefully for real this time.

From Apple:

Improved Game Controller Support

Control your favorite Mac games wirelessly with your favorite Made for iPhone controller.* Simply connect your iPhone or iPod touch to the controller and it’s ready for use with any supported Mac game.

This a bit of an odd way of handling controller support on Mac. From the sound of things, the controllers connect to the iPhone or iPad, which then wirelessly sends the controller input to the Mac.

Assuming the latency is low, it sounds good enough, though conceptually crazy. Lets hope it ships in the final OS. After all, controller support was supposed to ship in Mavericks.

Wrap-up

Those are just some quick thoughts on what Apple’s WWDC announcements mean for gaming on Apple platforms in the near future. I’ll delve more fully into each of these points as more information becomes available. For now, be sure to check out Apple.com for more information on these topics, and many more.