Ok, its finally here the awesome iPad 3 with is uber super 2048 x 1536 pixel retina display resolution! Its availabl now in the US and March 16th in Canada, UK, France, Germany, Switzerland and Japan.
Prices go like this:
- 16GB – $499 / £399
- 32GB – $599 / £499
- 64GB – $699./ £599
The IwGame Engine is gonna kick some serious a** on iPad 3!
Will need to upgrade the graphics in cOnnecticOns to account for the higher resolution display
sh1t now have to support 3 or 4 resource resolutions… damn
just to clarify a bit… all of the sudden I fell like I am back in the days of J2ME where each brand had to be supported in a different way and I had 17 base codes and asset packs for one product… knightmaressssss
I loved the idea of J2ME but hared the implementation, it was a true nightmare. Certification costs were insane as well.
I suspect that we will need to create separate versions for iPad 3 as carrying around all that additional data for iPad 1/2 and iPhone is going to be a huge waste.
I’m thinking about adding a new class to IwGame that lets you store all your resources on a web site. When te game is initially ran it downloads the resources and stores them all locally, downloading updated files in the future. The beauty of this is that you can distribute a small build and then only pick the resource you need for the target system. It also makes it possible to update the game after the game has been approved.
IwGame has all the stuff there to do it, I just need to free up some time to implement it.
Definetly, sclable graphics would be the ideal solution unfortunately no one supports them very well, since the early days of J2ME this has been an issue.
Yep sounds like a good way to handle that. The only other issue that I see is that people will have to wait for data to download so we need to add that extra complexity layer to the user…I see many false 1-star don’t work reviews in the future… Oh well I should not complain as much at least it’s an exciting new toy, only wish they had updated the front camera not just the back one, I skype a lot so that sucks for the effect.
Good point, although you could display a download in progress bar. In fact, you could distribute the main UI assets + level 1’s assets then download the other as and when required, maybe even in the background whilst Level 1 is in play. Mind you, if you had a hit it would probably grind the server to a halt 🙂
We need to get In-app purchasing up and running firstly however
maybe it’s time for vector graphics to revolutionize mobile development !
any chance some vector support can be added to IwGame ?
stock all vectors, when game runs for first time note display resolution and save vectors as png/jpg as needed for future use.
There is an SVG lib available for Marmalade so its a possibility. We will take a look at it.
The problem is that we have SVG since the early days of color J2ME displays, there have been professional editors built and gone… we do need vector graphics, but svg is DOA, or to be fair, a fragmented and poorly supported standard… perhaps we need a simpler standard or one that does not have so many inconsistencies from editors… Microsoft has done a very good job with it’s vector framework in the silverlight/Expresion products…
Anyway the game engine/company that finally gets vector graphics done right with physics, and a nice editor will probably take over the 2D game market once and for all… like unity did on 3D IMHO
XAML is a pretty good format, hence we modelled XOML on it. We have rendering of line and shapes on our roadmap, but haven’t yet looked into it in great detail. Rendering vector objects using polygons is quite a difficult process, but not impossible.