November 15, 2007 6:00 AMLivingArcana.com has announced that it has started development of an open-source 3D engine for the Apple iPhone platform in an effort to make the iPhone a viable option as a mobile gaming platform. Gregory Ray, a lead organizer of LivingArcana.com, has hired Brazilian programmer Gutemberg Ribeiro, creator of the open source Conceptus game engine, to port his engine over to the iPhone platform. The port will remain open source and will be available under LGPL license to allow true 3D game development on the iPhone. The Conceptus game engine - which already runs on the Windows, Mac, Symbian and even the Nintendo DS platforms - will bring ParticleFX, BSP, Octree, PagingLandscape, Zip Compression, GlGenerator, GlPostProcessor, OpenAL, and an Extension Loader to the new iPhone. This will enable game developers to focus on writing game code and will leave the low level hardware code to the Conceptus engine. When asked why Gregory would make this available for free and pay for it out of his pocket he was quoted "I am trying to stay true to the LivingArcana.com ideal of having a free community ran online game. The 3D engine is vital to the project but it is also only a very small part of a very large project and once we integrate it into the LivingArcana.com project I have no other plans of using it for other projects. Why would I want hundreds of hours to goto waste?" The first public release of Conceptus for the iPhone is scheduled for early 2008. It should also be mentioned that this project is being done without the support of Apple. Apple has said they will be offering official 3rd party support for native applications February 2008, however, the developers behind LivingArcana.com have been developing for the iPhone platform using a community released SDK for the iPhone. Gutemberg was quoted "We will need to update our engine to run off the the official Apple SDK when made available. Until then we will continue to use the community based SDK and just cross our fingers that Apple will appreciate what we are doing for their mobile platform."LivingArcana.com is a community based free MMORPG (Multi Massive Online Role Playing Game). It is different from traditional MMO's because the game is being designed (by the community) to be played in real life using GPS to track where the player's location is and allow them to interact with the environment or other players using their internet enabled mobile device. LivingArcana.com's mission is to free game players from their couch and computer chairs and to get them outside and participating in real life adventures and treasure hunts. Any player can add content to the game in their local area which will provide players with a rich unending game play experience.Head over to the website below for more information about LivingArcana.com.LivingArcana.comApple

	Read more at InsideMacGames
	www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ID=15875