Whilst looking around on the internet trying to find examples of how 3D games are made on the iPhone, I stumbled across what I now consider to be the best iOS library for 3D games.
Its call iOS Scene Graph Library or ISGL.
I have been playing around with it for about an hour now and I believe it will be more than suitable for use as a rendering engine in my project.
Initially I had wanted to do all of the rendering of images and particle systems myself, but now, I feel that if I offload some of the time consuming and trivial things over to a 3rd party engine, I can focus on the more complicated aspects such as the physics and implementation of a grid in 3D space.
I am considering simply using a 3D array for this, its simple, effective and it works. However, from what I have read and mentioned earlier, I could implement a ‘Coupled Map Lattice’ which is effectively dividing 3D space into cubes and allowing variables such a boolean statements to be set within them. It could be that this method may be faster than using a 3 dimensional array but testing will have to be done.
I may consider implementing both once I have a basic particle system for testing working. This way I can analyse each method, compare the data, make an informed decision on which one to choose and have some interesting findings to discuss in my dissertation.
Thanks for reading.