71² – The ramblings of two 30-something developers

Vertex Buffer Objects

A while back I posted on how I had been trying to use Vertex Buffer Objects with the tile map in Sir Lamorak’s Quest. Until recently everything was going really well and then I hit a snag.

Performance on the real device had been great but then all of a sudden dropped to 6fps. I spent ages trying to work out what I had changed and then realised that I had just populated the entire tile map with images. All tiles now had a image. On running some checks in instruments it was obvious that I was now maxing out the tile renderer :(

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Sprite Sheet Builder Tool

I have recently found a great tool for creating sprite sheets. I have been using a Java tool called Packer created by Kev Glass who wrote the Java game API called Slick.

The new app I have found is called Zwopple and is currently a web based Flash application, although I think plans are in place to create a downloaded AIR based version. It generates both the PNG file for the sprite sheet image along with a control file that is actually a plist file. That makes it SOOO easy on the iPhone to process :o)

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On MacDev Podcast

Whilst I was at the Voices That Matter iPhone Development conference I was interviewed for the InformIT On MacDev podcast series talking about beginning iPhone game development.

There are also podcasts of others who were talking at the conference such as Aaron Hillegass, Kevin Avila who did a talk on OpenAL and Erik Buck who is a co-author of Cocoa Design Patterns.

These guys really know their subject and are an interesting watch.

Podcast »

Mike

Sir Lamorak’s Quest Sneak Peak

Hi all

I’ve managed to put together a short movie of Sir Lamorak’s Quest. I wanted to give you all a preview of how the game is coming along and how its looking. I’m really pleased with how its coming along and I cant wait to get the book and the game finished and out in the wild.

If you have any comments please leave them as I’d love to hear what you think. Its not complete and still a lot to do, but I was eager to give you a sneak peak.

Sir Lamorak’s Quest Demo

Enjoy

Mike

Degenerate Triangles

I’ve been working on optimising some areas of Sir Lamorak’s Quest. Most recently this has been reviewing the Tiled class. I was until this week only rendering the tiles of the map that were visible on the screen thereby trying to reduce the amount of work the GPU was being asked to do.

During the iPhone conference I had a great conversation with Eric Buck after his talk “OpenGL ES in iPhone Games”. It turns out that I’m trying to compensate for something that the GPU can actually handle all on its own. Eric described the GPU in the iPhone as a “number crunching monster” that can actually process data over 100x faster than the CPU for certain tasks.

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VTM iPhone Conference has finished

Hi all

I wanted to thank all those people who made time to give me great feedback on my presentation today as well as those who told me they had been using the tutorials on the blog. It always amazes me how these things spread so quickly and I was nicely surprised at how many people at the conference knew of this blog and had been using its resources.

It was great to hear and I will work hard to keep posting new and interesting information and tutorials.

I had a great time at the conference and enjoyed all the sessions I attended and thanks to all those who attended mine “Beginning iPhone Game Development”. It was cool meeting with and chatting with Aaron Hillegass and Eric Buck. Eric did a fantastic OpenGL ES session and he gave me some great ideas during a chat we had afterwards. Once I have had a chance to try out the ideas I’ll post about them of course :o)

It was great to see so many people enthusiastic and wanting to learn how to develop games on the iPhone.

Here’s looking forward to the conference next year :o)

Mike

Deadmau5 Ghosts

Navigate your mouse around the mazes collecting cheeses to get rid of the ghosts. Aim for a high-score, get on the leaderboard and stay up-to-date with push notifications. Complete the game and download a free exclusive Deadmau5 track!

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Two Plus Two

Two Plus Two is a puzzle game that will get your brain flowing.

You are given twelve numbers which you must add together to make a randomly generated number at the bottom of the screen. You get a point for each of the twelve buttons you use. However, you get more points if you do it in the amount of turns displayed! Simple!

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Joystick Tutorial?

Hey everyone

First of all thanks to all those who are still reading the blog and checking out the tutorials. It has been quiet recently due to me travelling on business and Johns wedding and as I’ve said a few times the book is taking up a lot of my time.

That said, I have just finished implementing a touch joystick into Sir Lamorak’s Quest and was wondering if this is a tutorial people would like to see. As I don’t have much time I wanted to see what the interest was be before I did a quick tutorial on it.

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iPhone Developers Conference

I wanted to let people know that I have been invited to talk at the “Voices That Matter – iPhone Developers Conference” in Boston on the 17th and 18th October.

This will be a really great conference with some of the most well known names in Mac OS X and iPhone development on the speakers list. People such as Erica Sadun who wrote “The iPhone Deveopers Cook Book” and Aaron Hillegass who wrote “COCOA Programming for Mac OS X”.

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