Simulating Windows with Refraction

Some months ago I was approached by the Berlin-based Window-Manufacturing-Company “ISOGON” to help them program an app that let’s you configure orders for new windows (In case you want to build a house or modernize your current windows to waist less energy). Get it for free on the app-store.

Bug in Version 1.21 of iBeat for iOS Version 4.0-4.1

If iBeat crashes at startup on your iPhone or iPod Touch with iOS Version 4.0 or 4.1 please upgrade your iOS to Version 4.2. The App should then work correctly!

EDIT: Version 1.3 of iBeat fixes this, now it should work with all iOS Versions 3.1 to 4.3.

Howto set up shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation

Now here I have a bone to pick with many iOS Developers!

Please set up your UIViewController’s

"- (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:"

correctly, so you support both your Orientation and its UpsideDown-Version. Yes, it’s fine to just support Portrait or Landscape mode, but please support both directions!

Call for Help – Crashlogs for iOS 3.2 [Fixed]

Hey there!

This time I have an urgent problem, that I can only fix with your help!
Unfortunately the App iBeat seems to crash at the start on all iPads running iOS 3.2, while running perfectly fine on iPhones with iOS 3.1. (A friend has an old iPod I can use for testing)

I updated my own iPad to iOS 4.2 and since It isn’t possible to go back, I can’t test this problem on my own.
So If you have an iPad running iOS 3.2, please download (http://www.ibeat.us – its free) , start it, sync it with iTunes and finally send me the crashreport (ibeat@tactica.de). You may read about which folder the crashreports are in on your Computer here.

Thank you all in advance!

Beware alien vegetation!

So, at first I thought I’d just add a 3D Model of a thorned vine (still visible in the screenshot), but appearently, a little less 3D and a nice veined texture for the infected tile might do a much better job.

You can also see the new Interface-Element in the lower right, that always has the color of the active player!

Saving Battery Power in a turn-based game

I got inspired by a post on the toucharcade-forums by ed_welch who describes how he throttles FPS manually to the minimum value any animation needs to run.

Now I figured, I could render my game with 1 FPS as long as nothing happens, so I changed my code the following way:

• I start the game with a frameInterval of 60.
• Once I get a “touchesBegan” I go up to 2, that is 30FPS.
• Once I get a “touchesEnded”, I check whether there is any animation going on (the spinning arrows above a selected unit for example) or whether there is still another touch going on. This was pretty straight forward, since I store the points each finger started touching at in a CFDictionary, so I just needed to get its count and check if it’s zero. Then I set the frameInterval to 60 again
• My games main logic-class conforms to a “AnimationResponder” -protocol and the drawing classes store it as a “id<AnimationResponder> delegate”. So once an animation ended, I send this information to the main class and it throttles the FPS back to 1.

The result was so good, I could even feel a difference in the heat of my iPod!

Thank you Ed Welch!

To VBO or not to VBO ?

As I mentioned in the last post, a friend lend me an iPod 3G to test its hardware. I already compared CPU for its performance in filling the interleaved vertex array.

Now I’m going to have a look at the GPU, specifically the advantages of using Vertex Buffer Objects on the new PowerVR SGX chip.

vDSP on iPod 3G, ARM11

Thanks to the generous creator of Bowmaster, I now have an iPod Touch 3G at my disposal to test the hardware for one week.

Here I’m gonna start to compare the interleaved-array fillrate using sequential loops vs. the performance of vectorized operations with vDSP. I did this for my iPod 2G in another post.

OpenGL ES performance outline

For comparison against other 3D Engines, I wanted to publish my frames per second and triangles per second results.
I just want to be sure I didn’t miss any important trick I could have used to speed everything up.

Rejoyce: 1.5 will have ambient music

Yesterday I got a message by Markus Illko, telling me he liked tactica and that he wanted to make ambient sound tracks for it.

The samples he has on his homepage sound really promising, so now I’m looking forward to an awesome score.

Given I’ll also add some new animations to version 1.5, the media experience will have a whole new depth 🙂