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!