While Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo settle in for Xmas issuing news of games and deals, Apple simply basks in the support of game makers in readiness for 2009.
Two new iPhone and game-related slices of news have crossed the desk in the Underwater Castle's news room recently. The first concerns a rather technical new agreement signed between companies including Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, Codeplay and Electronic Arts. It concerns "the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 1.0 specification, the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices."
Yes, we initially thought, "Um?" Then we saw Andrew Richards, chief executive of Codeplay Software Limited saying that, "OpenCL 1.0 will play a vital part in opening up the power of Manycore processors and GPUs to developers in many application sectors."
Multicore or manycore? That's Xbox 360's Xenon, the PS3's Cell, and Intel and AMD's PC processors beloved of companies like Crytek and Valve. So, we decided to keep an eye on OpenCL. If you have any game-related implementation info for us, please contribute on the Forum (it's free!... as it should be).
Next up on the development front is the fact that Unity Technologies has now licensed its dev tech to 200 (admittedly unnamed) companies for the creation of games on iPhone and iPod Touch.
This is what you developer types get:
Live Preview
With the iPhone Remote, you can use an actual iPhone or iPod Touch to view and test your game live, right inside the Unity Editor. Just hit Play then test with iPhone in hand.
Seamless Publishing Workflow
Publishing a build for iPhone will create an entire, complete XCode project that just works. Press "Build and Run" in Unity and put your feet up. Relax until your game automatically compiles in XCode, installs, and launches.
High Performance Scripting
JavaScript and C# scripts are compiled to native ARM assembler code during the build process. This gives an average performance increase of 20-40 times over interpreted languages.
Occlusion Culling
Everybody loves high performance. PVS-based occlusion culling enabled on the iPhone is perfect for squeezing maximum performance out of the iPhone.
Shader Emulation
Mimic the graphical capabilities of the iPhone right inside the Unity Editor for fast WYSIWYG prototyping without any surprises in the final output.
Combiner based shaders
Unity exposes the full multi-texture capabilities of the iPhone. All aspects of the iPhone graphics pipeline can be modified through Unity's easy to use shader language.
PRVTC Texture Compression
Save your multilayer Photoshop files and let Unity automatically compress your images with PRVTC Texture Compression. It's all automatic without a single required click. This greatly reduces memory usage and distribution size, and also improves rendering performance.
More info is available over here.
Two new iPhone and game-related slices of news have crossed the desk in the Underwater Castle's news room recently. The first concerns a rather technical new agreement signed between companies including Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, Codeplay and Electronic Arts. It concerns "the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 1.0 specification, the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices."
Yes, we initially thought, "Um?" Then we saw Andrew Richards, chief executive of Codeplay Software Limited saying that, "OpenCL 1.0 will play a vital part in opening up the power of Manycore processors and GPUs to developers in many application sectors."
Multicore or manycore? That's Xbox 360's Xenon, the PS3's Cell, and Intel and AMD's PC processors beloved of companies like Crytek and Valve. So, we decided to keep an eye on OpenCL. If you have any game-related implementation info for us, please contribute on the Forum (it's free!... as it should be).
Next up on the development front is the fact that Unity Technologies has now licensed its dev tech to 200 (admittedly unnamed) companies for the creation of games on iPhone and iPod Touch.
This is what you developer types get:
Live Preview
With the iPhone Remote, you can use an actual iPhone or iPod Touch to view and test your game live, right inside the Unity Editor. Just hit Play then test with iPhone in hand.
Seamless Publishing Workflow
Publishing a build for iPhone will create an entire, complete XCode project that just works. Press "Build and Run" in Unity and put your feet up. Relax until your game automatically compiles in XCode, installs, and launches.
High Performance Scripting
JavaScript and C# scripts are compiled to native ARM assembler code during the build process. This gives an average performance increase of 20-40 times over interpreted languages.
Occlusion Culling
Everybody loves high performance. PVS-based occlusion culling enabled on the iPhone is perfect for squeezing maximum performance out of the iPhone.
Shader Emulation
Mimic the graphical capabilities of the iPhone right inside the Unity Editor for fast WYSIWYG prototyping without any surprises in the final output.
Combiner based shaders
Unity exposes the full multi-texture capabilities of the iPhone. All aspects of the iPhone graphics pipeline can be modified through Unity's easy to use shader language.
PRVTC Texture Compression
Save your multilayer Photoshop files and let Unity automatically compress your images with PRVTC Texture Compression. It's all automatic without a single required click. This greatly reduces memory usage and distribution size, and also improves rendering performance.
More info is available over here.
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