Well me, Santa and the elves have been very busy bees this week and between us we managed to hammer out another update to the IwGame Engine before Christmas (Thanks Santa, couldn’t have done it without those delicious mince pies!)

Here are the latest changeds for IwGame v0.26:

• Bug fix – Actor crash bug when no camera assigned to the scene
• Bug fix – Fixed CIwGameHttp crash bug
• Bug fix – Fixed ad rendering crash bug
• Bug fix – Deleted scenes are now removed at the end of a frame and not immediately
• Bug fix – Scenes with no attached camera didnt set transform correctly
• Bug fix – Sprite hit test could be called before transform was set up
• Accelerometer support added to CIwGameInput
• Compass support added to CIwGameInput
• CIwGameAdsMediator added to mediate ad requests between multiple ad providers to improve fill rate
• Support for VServ, Mojiva, Millenial Media and AdModa ad providers added
• ExtraInfo added to ad requests to allow custom information to be passed to ad providers
• Added URLDecode method to CIwGameString

New here? What’s IwGame? IwGame is an open source free to use cross platform game engine for iPhone, iPad, Android, Bada, Playbook, Symbian, Windows Mobile, LG-TV, Windows and Mac, built on top of the Marmalade SDK. You can find out more and download the SDK from our IwGame Engine page.

I want to include a big thank you to all those that have reported bugs and documentation errors, especially Phillip who saved me many hours of proof reading.

As you can see from te list of changes there are a fair few bug fixes (sorry about that), but more importantly some new stuff:

New Ad Networks Added

Yes, we now support six ad providers (twelve ad providers indirectly), a couple which also deliver ads from other networks providing you with access to 12 ad networks in total. Here’s the complete list:

• Inner-active
• AdFonic
• Vserv – Also provides support for InMobi, BuzzCity, JumpTap, ZestAdz / Komli Mobile and Inner-active
• Mojiva
• Millennial Media – Also provides support for AdMob, Amobee, JumpTap and Mojiva
• AdModa

Many thanks to those ad providers that bent over backwards to support our integration efforts.

New Ad Mediation Support

Now we have so many ad providers we need some way of mediating ad requests between them all. Ad Mediation is the process of going through a list of prioritised ad providers requesting an ad, if the ad provider does not provide an ad then request an ad from the next provider. Keep on doing this until you get an ad that you can use. This should hlpe you attaina near 100% fill rate and maximise your apsp potential ad revenues.

IwGame provides automated ad mediation using the CIwGameAdsMediator. To use the mediator you create a CIwGameAdsMediator, populate it with ad party’s then attach it to the CIwGameAds object as shown below:

// Create ad mediator and attach it to the main ad object
CIwGameAdsMediator* ad_mediator = new CIwGameAdsMediator();
IW_GAME_ADS->setMediator(ad_mediator);

// Create Inner-active ad party and add to the mediator
CIwGameAdsParty* party = new CIwGameAdsParty();
party->ApplicationID = "Your inner-active App ID";
party->Provider = CIwGameAds::InnerActive;
ad_mediator->addAdParty(party);

// Create AdModa ad party and add to the mediator
party = new CIwGameAdsParty();
party->ApplicationID = "You AdModa App ID";
party->Provider = CIwGameAds::AdModa;
ad_mediator->addAdParty(party);

// Create AdFonic ad party and add to the mediator
party = new CIwGameAdsParty();
party->ApplicationID = "Your AdFonic App ID";
party->Provider = CIwGameAds::AdFonic;
ad_mediator->addAdParty(party);

As you can see, incredibly simple. The process of attaching the ad mediator will ensure that the ad object will attempt to collect ads from all ad parties should previous parties fail to collect an ad. You do not need to make any changes to the ad view, the system is completely automated.

Support for Accelerometer and Compass added to CIwGameInput

CIwGameInput now has support for reading the devices accelerometer and compass devices allowing you to integrate these alternative input methods into your games.

Well that’s it for this update. More features coming soon (probably in the new year).

Happy holidays everyone!