In yet more proof that people only think there's no games news for RISC OS because they don't look for it, Rik Griffin has announced he has taken over the Popcorn games library, originally written by Matthew Bloch. "Popcorn is a library to aid in the writing of RISC OS games written in C", Rik says. "It incorporates a fast sprite plotter, an object manager, a resource manager and several other useful functions. Popcorn is free to use, and source code is provided." Indeed, the license allows you to use the code for whatever purpose you wish, including commercial games.

Rik has updated Popcorn with various bug fixes and improvements, but it is not 32-bit compatible as yet. He has also written a simple tutorial on how to use Popcorn, describing how to use it to write a Pong game. A StrongHelp manual is also avaliable.

The standard game provided as an example of Popcorn, Hive, has also been updated - a lovely little Space Invaders game, with really nice graphics. As Rik says, "Popcorn is never going to set the games world alight, but if you fancy writing a simple (by modern standards) 2D game, it will save you a lot of time." Rik would be interested to know if any of you are going to start developing games with this stuff.

Source: comp.sys.acorn.games