Comments on: What’s in Tutorial 10

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:49:25 +0000

Great tutorials Mike, keep up the good work!

By: mike

mike — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:40:41 +0000

Thanks Joey, I’m glad the tutorials are useful. The syntax can be odd, which is what I found coming from a Java background, but you do get used to it.

I’m working on the code for Tutorial 10 at the moment and I will be posting a video update later today. This is not the tutorial, but will give everyone sight of what I’m working on and should be in the tutorial.

Mike

By: Joey Davidson

Joey Davidson — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:45:58 +0000

Absolutely fantastic tutorials, Mike. I, just recently, began learning Objective-C so I can develop for the iPhone, and I must say that much of your explanations are, in fact, quite helpful. I still have troubles understanding the most basic of syntax (because Obj-C and C++ are very different), but I know quite a bit of what works and what does not. I am looking forward to this final tutorial. I have already developed a game in flash, and to tell you the truth, I am quite excited to see how you are going to code up yours.

Joey

By: mike

mike — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:44:08 +0000

Hi ieattictacs and thanks for the comments. I’m always happy to hear how the tutorials could be improved and I’ll certainly see what I can do in terms of explaining things in a little more detail :o)

Glad you enjoy the tutorials

Mike

By: ieattictacs

ieattictacs — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:39:32 +0000

I have only seen Tutorial 1, so sorry if the information is irrelevent. I am reposting a comment made on Tutorial 1 to make sure it is heard, I will then catch up, and probably update what needs to be updated in another post.

“Hey there Mike, I love your tutorials. I hope you don’t stop, if I had money I’d donate… Well anyways thank you for being the only tutorial source (and a good one at that) for iPhone App Programming. I think you should set up a news letter to update us, but just when you release a new tutorial, not the other posts. Or those could be an option or something.

Also, a tip would be to get more detailed with what you write, tell us why you type what you type as you type it, how it works and why you need it to work with the rest of the code. I wouldn’t mind having a 10min. longer video for easier learning. If you do listen then thank you, very much. Keep up the excellent work.”

By: mike

mike — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:24:26 +0000

Hi Eskema. I’ve not tried changing the glTexEnvi parameters, but by being able to stop blending of the tilemap and caching the sprite sheet textures I’ve got my tile map scrolling using the accelerometer, sprites moving around and particles etc at a really steady 60fps :oD

All the changes I’ve made and my example code for this will be inside Tutorial 10.

Mike

By: Eskema

Eskema — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:13:49 +0000

I forgot one more thing, try and change this line in the setup of opengl

glTexEnvi(GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL_BLEND_SRC);

by this one disabling blending, I gain some fps

glTexEnvi(GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL_REPLACE);

By: Eskema

Eskema — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:49:44 +0000

Excellent news Mike, the only way to improve the performance its the precalculation of all tiles. Blending does not offer a way to avoid this overhead, except disabling it. Really complex all this opengl stuff

By: mike

mike — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:05:19 +0000

Hi Eskema, that is a really good point as blending is a big overhead. I think it would certainly be useful for blending to be disabled if the tile map does not need it which should speed things up.

I’ve not found a way of improving the performance of blending as it has to do what it has to do.

For Tutorial 10 I’m going to add an option to the rendering selector in the Tiled class which will allow you to switch blending on or off and I’m working on the pre-calculation of texture coordinates for sprite sheets.

Mike

By: Eskema

Eskema — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:16:11 +0000

Actually Mike, the main problem its not only the tilesize, as you said precalculate vertex and texture could be a great benefit, in fact could boost the game around 20fps easilly. But glblend is taking all cpu time right now. If I disable glblend, things turn back to a more stable FPS, around 45-60 wich is great.
I need to do some more tests :)