iGalcon – touch input, orientation handling, and fun!
I had some pretty good progress today 
I got touch input implemented and tweaked pretty well for playing the game. I also got in some crude orientation handling so that the numbers on the planets are readable from any normal orientation of the device. I also added in a simple AI player, adjusted planet sizes, and added simple particle effects.
Next up: improved graphics, font, and sound effects. I’m still pretty mystified by ObjC, but I’m getting by, I suppose. It amazes me how much boilerplate junk is in languages that are not python 
Ah well, that’s life I guess. On the practical side of things, I’m continuing to keep my SDL version of this working, so I can do work within my linux environment. I’m glad I did all that work on tinypy, as I feel pretty comfortable in C now.
June 17th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
I guess I’ll also mention I spent a bit of time optimizing today. I found the game was lagging when many ships were on the screen. I was able to speed it up a fair amount by combining many OpenGL operations into single arrays.
I also found that most of the slow-down was due to the debug overhead. When I turn off debug mode, Galcon is quite zippy on the iphone
June 17th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Have I mentioned that I am sooooo buying this the instant it comes out?
June 17th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
PoV patiently waits for certification… dot dot
June 17th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
@john – yay for 1st sale
@PoV – I think tonic mentioned the company he works for got one (Europe) so they must finally be getting to you crazy foreigners now …
June 17th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
YAY! (hey phil, this is anders from pycon). We talked a while about making galcon for the iphone, you porting this might inspire me to buy one
I’m loving the updates, and I’m excited to see what comes of it all.
Now I want some video!
~ Anders
June 17th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
@Anders – are you the fellow who let me try out his iphone? Anyway, if so, that was what sealed the deal for me. I knew I had to do it once I saw how slick the interface was
Is there an easy way to make video with the iphone SDK? If someone can point me to the “how-to” I’ll see if I can get something together for next time.
June 17th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
@Anders, err, oops. I clearly didn’t read your whole message
It’s a really fun device, that’s for sure. I got the ipod touch because I didn’t want a cell phone. It’s an amazing photo album + music player + Galcon-o-rama!