Our recent game development experience with Letter Blocks 3D has shown once again that shared RAM system is one of the biggest bottlenecks on iOS devices. This became even more relevant with iOS 4 and its multitasking support. Careless users tend to leave a lot of apps and browser tabs to stay in background and… →
Recent Posts by Sergei
Triangle stripping utility for iPhone OpenGL ES developers
Triangle stripping is one of the most efficient ways to increase frame rate in complex scenes. There are good open source libraries around that can be used for stripping. One of them is NvTriStrip available on NVidia website. NvTriStrip is written in cross-platform C++ and can be easily built with Xcode. I have wrapped up… →
JellyTouch vs Unity: Rendering Performance Test
JellyTouch is an OpenGL ES game development framework created by Surgeworks. Unlike many popular RAD tools like Unity or Torque our framework is for hardcore developers, those programming geeks who like to retain total control over the code and not willing to trade game performance for RAD development comfort. JellyTouch is a set of Objective-C… →
What works and what doesn’t to improve OpenGL ES rendering performance on iPhone
Last weeks I have been working hard on optimizing our 3D engine JellyTouch. I have tried eventually all recommended methods to improve rendering performance and discovered that some of them work well, some provide small benefit and some don’t work at all. I think it is a good idea to share my results and probably… →
How to build a 3D tag cloud on iPhone — challenges and solutions
Since the iPhone tocuhscreen is quite small and has great support for interactivity a 3D tag cloud looks an ideal choice for an iPhone application user interface. Neither iPhone SDK classes nor 3rd party libraries have 3D tag cloud classes, at least no libraries I heard of, so I implemented it from scratch. You can… →
How to implement shadows with OpenGL ES on iPhone SDK — an overview
One of our projects currently under development is a 3D puzzle game where player will manipulate a number of cubic blocks. Those blocks can be moved above the board so to look realistic they need to cast shadows onto the board. Despite shadows are used in many 3D games and OpenGL ES does have all… →
How to implement resumable file downloads on iPhone SDK
File downloading is a feature used very often in various applications. You may need to get an update from the server, to provide optional resources to the user or to get a copy of a shared document — all this functionality deals with file downloads. And as long as downloads go over network they can… →
Creating an iPhone Game, the Developer's view
I personally enjoy game development very much since every game is a challenge to program, an exciting experience unique by nature unlike those boring database applications that as it seems constitute the majority of custom software market. Many of the games will use your hardware up to the limit and require thorough optimization in fight… →