Box2D, Gamecenter and Objective C++

For the past two to three weeks I have been toying around with iOS Gamecenter Kit and in last few days Box2D. Gamecenter makes it pretty easy to initialize a multiplayer game. The classes used in Gamecenter make it really sound simple but understanding the flow and the requirement of understanding Blocks in C is what makes the learning curve a little bit longer.
But suffice it to say, I was able to use a combination of Ray Wenderlich's game center tutorial and a book from Amazon on iOS game center, I was able to write a GameCenter Manager class and implement a basic multiplayer Tic Tac Toe game. Not really worth putting on the app store though as I can see tons of high class versions. Unless you have an original game concept, forget about putting it on app store as most of the known games are on the app store in ten different versions.
On the other side, I have been toying with Box2D in order to ramp up my C++. Using the tutorials at iforce2d, which are great to understand Box2D, I have been ramping up my physics knowledge. Box2D is a great physics engine to begin with but you better know C++ because pretty soon, to use Box2D in the realm of iOS you will be dabbling in Objective C++, a combination of Objective-C and C++. iforce2d has very good introductory tutorials on concepts of Box2D and if you want to follow along with the tutorials on an iPad or iPod/iPhone device instead of a Mac, I was able to recreate the Box2D testbed (with help of iforce2d's iOS setup tutorial and bunch of online resources including the contributions section of Box2D source code page). It took me two days to figure out how to get that to compile in Xcode 4.3 with the right libraries and right combo version of Box2D 2.1.2 and 2.2.x. Here is the link to the Xcode project (Universal binary project) with all necessary files. You should be able to just download, compile and run using the right base SDK and continue the iforce2d tutorials on your iOS device!

• iOS Box2D Testbed

As far as my quest to port Game AI book, I am have not revisited my Chapter 5 code since January. Now that I am learning C++ as part of Box2D education, I am rethinking wether its worth porting Matt's book to Objective-C. One of reasons to port was to learn Objective-C. Now that I have pretty good handle on it, I am debating whether to continue with the port. Maybe, I can just make the C++ code run on the iOS device making the necessary calls to graphics libraries for drawing commands just like another blogger had mentioned. At least I will be able to finish reading the book :).