Feb
12
Written by:
Jashan Chittesh
2011-02-12T16:55:45
I thought I'd quickly post some results of tests with my iOS builds that I first created yesterday. I'm pretty amazed how well this is working giving that this is the very first time I put Traces of Illumination on mobile devices, and when I first started developing the game, I hadn't considered putting it on mobile devices ... and I was using a lot of stuff that I wouldn't have used when designing the game for mobile from the start.
Well, V1.1.2 did have the goal to implement optimizations that would make the game run on mobile devices, and it seems I did a pretty decent job so far ;-)
I did need a few little GUI enhancements so the game could actually be played on mobile devices with a touch screen: Obviously, there was a need for left/right buttons which are at the moment simple in the lower left / right parts of the screen. Also, I made the power ups "tappable". So, instead of pressing keys, you can now tap the power-ups to use them. This works great on the iPad, and pretty okay on the iPhone 4. On the iPhone 3GS, due to the limited resolution, it's not that great, yet.
What really surprised me was that I could play the game right from the start. In the menu screen which uses UnityGUI heavily, I get decent 30 FPS, even on the iPhone 3GS (I'm not gonna try making Traces of Illumination work on iPhone 3G - sorry). Well, it's 23 FPS but that's fine for a menu screen. In game, with iPad and iPhone 4 I get 20-30 FPS which I think is alright. The game is very playable at this framerate. With the iPhone 3GS, it goes down to around 15-20FPS, which is still playable but not that great.
But keep in mind: All I did so far was to take my fat Web player / desktop standalone game and put it on the mobile devices almost exactly as it was. I haven't done a single session of on-device profiling and optimizing.
One funny thing is that I still can put quality to "Fantastic" on the mobile devices (I also use the same GUI I use on the desktop, which is obviously currently the greatest problem on the smaller screens with touches as you can probably imagine from the screenshot above). I was really surprised to see that even the render textures for the floor would work on iPhone 4 and iPad. But ... there I get the kind of framerate that I thought I was gonna have to deal with: 3-5 FPS. That's unplayable. But that's the quality for "high-end" machines. That doesn't even run smoothly on a MacBook Pro running on battery.
So, I'm all happy. As things went so smooth, I thought that maybe even networking would work out of the box. Well, connecting works and then the app crashes. Well, maybe that was too much to expect.
Anyways, I'll completely re-design and re-implement all GUI elements because that's what completely doesn't work on the mobile devices. I'll be using EZ GUI for this ... it's gonna be fun!!! :-)
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