I am porting my existing app store game to support iPad HD retina display. I hope to have it finished this month. I am using EGZUI to make a resolution independent GUI. I don’t have an iPad to test on, unfortunately. I am hesitant to shell out $500 for an iPad because the 2nd generation iPads are coming in a few months (1stQ 2011) and I would rather wait and buy the 2nd-gen.
If I use the Unity editor to make sure my game runs at all supported resolutions, and then I build and test on these devices:
iphone1st gen OS 3.1
ipod touch 4th gen OS 4.2
Then what is the likelyhood it will run fine on iPad devices?
Are there any other gotchas, other than the 1024x768 screen resolution, to keep in mind when porting a game to iPad?
The screen being so much larger can make controls handle rather differently, though it depends on what you’re doing exactly. Also, it’s not just the resolution, but the aspect ratio is 4:3 instead of 3:2 (unless that’s what you meant).
By the way, I am not using any fancy shaders; just vertex lit vertex lit transparent and one particle shader. I should not enable OpenGL ES 2.0 right, because that will slow down my framerate, is the true? Currently I am using OpenGL ES 1.1 and it works fine for this particular game. Not sure of the pros and cons of going with 2.0
Yes going for OpenGL ES 2.0 will hit your framerate quite a bit (how hard depends on what you use etc, but 2 figure percentages are the norm)
But you can choose to go to ARMV6 + ARMV7 and disable ES 2.0 in the xcode project through a simple define for example.
If you don’t use programmable pipeline, using ES 2.0 does not gain you anything but enabling the ARMV7 targeting is a pretty good idea performance wise if the raise of the app size by 16mb or so is acceptable for you. as mentioned above, just disable OpenGL ES 2.0 afterwards
I kind of hate the turn over rate of apple tech, 1 year and your device is out dated. I hate going through the process of selling the previous generation for a 60-70% original price and then shelling out for the new one.
iPad2 better have a killer resolution, better GPU and 512ram (or more) like the iphone4.
Welcome to technology…that’s nothing to do with Apple. In fact their turnover is slower than average. You should be happy it’s only once a year and not more often. Also, as a developer it’s not really a good idea to be selling the previous generation, unless you have other people testing on older devices, but that seems kind of inconvenient.
apple is easy actually
android spits 20-30 configuration per year, computers several ten thousand.
Apple has 1 new device per product line per year at max and that won’t change, cause although apple “shits money”, they still have a software department of laughable size, they couldn’t even support twice as many desktop configurations (they can’t even support what they have as the ati gpu drivers show in a stunningly laughable way), not considering new hardware platforms on the mobile end each 6 month that add enough new to be sellable for premium daydream rates (ie Apple prices)
Aside of the lack of software support in such a case as devs would lower the focus on iOS if the effort to keep stuff running fine and smooth for as many users as possible would grow even more as it did this year thanks to apple breaking iTouch vs iPhone 1:1 comparability and the introduction of the ipad with a much too weak gpu and lack of RAM
I don’t think they did; the 4th gen devices are more directly comparable than the 2nd gen devices, aside from the RAM, which is unlikely to make any difference to anyone here.
Here’s one thing: because the pixel density is so much greater on an iphone 4 retina display compared to an ipod touch and because ipod doesn’t support dynamic fonts you’ll have to load a different, bigger font when testing for high resolution display otherwise all the text will come out tiny.
It might look alright in the editor depending on your screen resolution (on my mac an iphone 4 resolution screen is about half the size of my monitor) but you’ll have to compress that down to the actual size of the device screen.
On the 2nd gen though it was a minimally faster cpu and thats it. That at best impacted the drawcall budget you had, nothing to worry much about.
Having half as much RAM is much more impacting on stability, especially as we talk about a HD resolution device here which is running on the lower edge all the time anyway. Also loading times suffer corresponding as you can no longer cache the HD assets, you are forced to put in loading breaks the iPhone 4 didn’t need. The same thing you now have to do with iPads on iOS4.x cause apple fires off memory warnings before considering to totally unload all sleeping apps, especially preventing their memory bombs from restarting without being asked. I really hope apple stops their arrogance and gets Mail, Safari, Music Player, … under the same constraints as any other application, for the sake of stability and performance.