GR++ on HW

EDIT : Ooops: Posted this on the wrong blog Should have been on Gamedev blog

Managed to get to grips with the getting my code signed and runnable on production iPhone. It’s a bit of a pallaver to be honest and I don’t really want to go into any detail for fear of breaking any NDAs. However the good news is that it does work, the bad news is GR+++ runs incredibly slowly.

It’s shouldn’t take long to sort out, I’m confident the main code is plenty fast enough; the unofficial SDK version proves that’s the case.

The likely culprit is the OpenGL code that downloads the game screen into a texture. I had a problem similar to this on the mac version a long while ago. I’d created the texture in GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_5_6_5 format, the same format that the game itself runs in and this went really slow. The reason was that the HW itself doesn’t seem to support this format natively and the driver itself was doing a very inefficient conversion to RGBA. The solution was changing the texture to RGBA8 and doing my own rather nippier conversion from 565. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the case this time as well. Gareth mentioned he’d seen someone on a messageboard say they’d had problems with something similar. It’ll be that or the sound I’m sure.

In other news a chap on the yakyak forum has written a really nice looking iPhone game called Rolando, you can see it here. It’s a nice OpenGL based title that uses tilt a lot and has a bit of a LocoRoco aesthetic going on. The web page has an ace little animation showing the game working and I asked him how he’d recorded this and he pointed me in the direction of Screenium by Synium. This little app allows you to make a video of an area of the macs screen which in turn means you can run your game in the iPhone simulator and grab the output of that. Neato. I did a quick (and in much needed of improvement) test here.

It’s been a pretty good few days for random apps on the mac. I can recommend having a look at these:

Viscosity: a great OpenVPN front end for the mac that replaces TunnelBlick which was okay but a bit flakey at times. Even though it’s only in beta Vicosiy has been rock solid the last few days.

Cornerstone: A very slick looking SVN front end. I quite like using SVN from the command line but this is quite nice. Would be handy for artists innit