I’ve got the iPhone 3G, so game development became significant faster.
As I expected all optimizations, which I did in engine, improved fps a lot – so it wasn’t a time waste at all. The performance is important for me, cause good game play feeling is very related with frames per second. Bearing in mind that this game will use not a few physics. Talking about physics, Respite won’t be a simple shoot-and-go game, I want something like in HL2, where you should solve some physic-puzzles, or mini-tasks, and only then able to move on. I already did objects moving like in HL2 (it’s always funny to play with physics )

Now game is running at 30-50 fps with:
* pretty large level – 5000 poly, 1024×1024 diffuse texture, 512×512 AO lightmap texture;
* hero personage – 600 poly, 256×256 diffuse texture, 40 bones, 10 animations;
* physics (few cubes) and collisions;
* gui (move controllers, buttons);

So, here is some early in game screen shots:

Game logo

So what can it do?

For now, it has:

- standard tools (select, move, rotate, scale, connect, clone).
- physics (you can create rigid bodies or collision objects, like boxes, spheres or cylinders, connect each with joints, add motors, change all physics parameters etc.).
- triggers (different types, timers to activate).
- events (you can add different events according to the object type: add impulse to the physics object, destroy connections, joints, change color, speed and whatever you want).
- particle emitters (you can add wind, gravity, size, color, random factory etc.).
- collision nodes (which you can connect to lines to create stairs, collision walls, corners).
- sound entity.
- simple gui (panels, buttons, lists, text boxes).
- save/load to binary “map” file.

So you able to create systems, which may interact with game world as a part of other systems.
Events and triggers (with timers) allows to create even more interesting systems. Here is a short video:

Now I can add things like: doors, traps, lifts, even simple triggered tasks for game player.

I tried to keep all things simple as I was able to do so (both code, and editor as a tool). I think now my game(s) development will get more acceleration.

By the way, I worked a lot on my game (”Respite”) conception too. Tried to clean up story line, refused some ideas as it doesn’t fit to the iphone game at all, also I was very busy with level design (you should see dozens of dozens sheet of papers around me ).

Here is some concept art for game:

Characters

Vehicles and environment

Also implemented octree algorithm for game level space subdivision, in my opinion this should help to gain more performance on the iphone. As I working on iPhone simulator only, I can’t see actually performance, and this makes me nervous.
But I prepared lots of optimization already (PVR texture compression, reductions in the size of the all geometry vertex array (floats to shorts), interleaving vertex data, same geometry sharing for animated models – this should lead to significant performance).

One more thing: I am going to get iPhone (probably next week), many thanks to Woody Deck!

I hope to finish, at least this one

“Respite” – 3d action iphone game, was inspired by blame manga and diablo 3 styles, mixing future fantasy, sci-fi and apocalypse.
Yet I can not disclose the main ideas But I can show you some development screen-shots and even video:

Character rigging (models are low poly – 250-400 poly)

Character animation

Level construction using 3dsmax

I am writing engine with c++ and some objective c code for touche-event handling. What I have written so far: texture manager, model loader (with skeleton animation), 2d render classes, collision system. Now I am working on culling (octree) and level loader, so next post will be related with these problems.

By the way I got my mac mini and I am coding a game engine with XCode for a couple of month already. Currently I am using only iphone simulator to test my engine, but I am thinking about actual device purchase…

Game menu screen

So far I have done game tools, initial game play and implemented simple gui. I hope so, I could show you some videos of my work soon.

So far, some updates from him:

Game sketch

I’m still working on level loading and game physics…

3D map for J2ME game (all textures resolution is low as possible)

That’s why I started to develop game for iPhone. I have read a lot articles about games, marketing, what kind of games have got huge success for iPhone. The main thing is: a lot of people play games when they have time to kill (waiting for the bus or friends of the meeting). The game shouldn’t be complicated, it should be extra fun, and may have attraction, which brings a desire to play again.

I think I have a pretty nice idea – it will be a puzzle type game with physics and some kind of story. Currently I am working on physics and level editor. Some game concept, which I made:

While I wait my mac-mini, I decided to create simple game for mobile phones with J2ME.
Here it is what I have done so far:

Network platform – simple commands sending, receiving and processing classes using TCP. Server side was made with c++ (scalable for multi-user) and client with J2ME (using two threads – one for commands receive and one for send).

Login system – client gui and some code on network platform.

Lobby – client gui (list, buttons, text box, font rendering):

Some environment design stages:

Currently I get ~22-30fps on my Nokia 6120c.

Collision system – firstly it was simple ray test collision, but for the performance issues (M3G checks ray test for all triangles in the scene) I changed it to circle-lines collision. My game will be based on “one height” plane, so this is fit for me, especially when it’s x2 faster now:

Note: collision lines can be non-perpendiculars and connected in to different groups.

Gun animation – I decided that gun should be animated 2d frames instead of 3d models for a better performance:

Sum up: Those, who have java skills already, J2ME is perfect environment to create games for mobile phones.

Next: I will try to create game play mechanics (player movements, shooting, different gun types)…

PoolStars project

So what’s now? – I am starting my own projects – mobiles games, and not some casual single player games, but multiplayer online games! I think those countries like Japan, China (they have 3G at last!), Korea is waiting for games like that
I am thinking about two platforms – iPhone and J2ME. Here is some my notes about these platforms:

iPhone – perfect business environment, easy to publish, easy to develop (considering that I have strong
OpenGL skills already). Also the new iPhone 3GS is on the market already, which supports OpenGL ES 2.0 (shaders!) drew my attention a lot.
It’s on the wave right now. Everybody talks about and everybody mad about it.

J2ME – huge market, very easy to develop for it. Also it has M3G – Mobile 3D Graphics API, which can allow you to make a 3d games on a huge amount of devices.

I already started to work, firstly on J2ME, but soon I will try myself on iPhone in a parallel mode. So wait some updates…

Currently I am working on fluid dynamics (real particle water). Be patience, I will post some screenshots in the near future.

In this shader I need to avoid a lot of ‘if’ instructions to establish various light types, many cycles and etc…

Multiple lights are really where shaders muff up.

I estimated all lights and now I have 7 different light types. Each of them brings 3 potential samplers into shader – a 2d shadow map, a cube shadow map, and a projected cube map. Naturally, lighting shader has 4 samplers, that are already engaged – base texture maps: ColorMap, NormalMap, SpecularMap and HeightMap. Therefore, I used all possible 16 samplers very rationally. Oh, by the way last week I made Motion Blur (currently I am blending only one previous frame):

Soldier motion blur                                          Camera (fast movement) motion blur

Of course, it is not the “real” motion blur, but it requires just few adjustments to achieve the real one (blend several frames with accumulation buffer…).

In conclusion – some person’s reaction of the CryEngine2 technology trailer:

• “Why this video is exceptional?”
• “I don’t notice anything there that I haven’t seen before.”

Did everybody game-players/developers degraded? Oh well… What does the future hold in store for us?