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That's a fun screen saver, I look forward to seeing where you take it.

I don't usually have one enabled but I think I'll leave that setup

Thanks madeyes.  I was going to try to avoid having to use emulation but it works for now and at least I can compile it without having to do any kind of emulation.

Probably not a bad thing having dosbox lying around anyway.

Nice demo rain_storm!

Hey guys,

Just trying to run this on my new Windows 8 64bit machine and I'm getting an error about it being an 'Unsupported 16-Bit Application'.

I've had a quick search around the internet and haven't found a way to run it.  Just wondering if anyone has any bright ideas for me?

Unfortunately I haven't had time to do any demo coding in a very long time, but work wise and for personal tinkering I am mostly using C++ with a sprinkling of Objective C and Java.

What are you using Hotshot?

Since you are getting a bit of Android feedback I'll give the Playbook a bit of a write up.

Only comes in 7" afaik so if you want a big tablet it's out straight away.

Performance wise, I've found them quite powerful.  They run ShadowGun silky smooth which is fairly impressive visually for a tablet game.

I've found the touch screen responsive and easy to use.

The default in achievements / leaderboards / etc. go through Scoreloop which has a lot of features so you get some cool online features with games that support it.

Not as many free apps on the store as you would get on the other platforms but the apps I've paid for are high quality.

Very easy to develop for using either Java or C/C++.

I feel it's a very well priced tablet.

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I haven't played with a Nexus 7 yet but I have played with the transformer and I was very impressed with that little machine!

Hi Parasight, welcome to the forums!

You may or may not see me around as I seem to randomly drift in and out of here a lot

Hi Clyde,

I think Jim means to set the alpha component of black pixels to 0 and then set the alpha component of any other pixels to 255.

That way when you enable blending with glEnable(GL_BLEND) the pixels you have marked with a 0 value for the alpha channel won't display but the others will.

Hope that helps

Hey guys,

Sorry to pull up an old thread but I only stop in here every couple of years

Just wondering if you guys ended up doing some demo coding with iOS (or any other mobile platform)?

I tinker around with mobile development quite a bit and would be interested to see anything you have done or help out if needed.

From my experience I don't think obj-c is going to be any kind of bottle neck.  We could debate the speed comparisons in specific situations but the power of the iPhone and iPad is incredible so you probably won't notice the differences anyway.

I personally use c++ but only because I'm familiar with it and have a lot of old code kicking around that I don't want to port to obj-c.

You could always use asm

I've finally broken out FASM and WinAsm and started to tinker.

The first thing I've noticed that I haven't worked out is that my .exe has been generating at 2560 bytes since the first compile.

I keep adding code and the .exe is still sitting at 2560b.

Can anyone tell me why this is?

If options may make a difference, I'm using the WinAsm version that has all of the FASM bits and pieces built in and to my knowledge the only options I've changed are the paths so that they match my FASM and OllyDbg folders.

So far I've found the WinAsm / FASM combo really nice to use so thankyou to whoever it was that recommended it to me a long while ago

I don't think it is doing what you want and I can't think of any nice way to do what you want off the top of my head.

Perhaps you could overload += 

Just wondering if anyone has been to the Aussie demo party called Syntax?

http://www.syntaxparty.org/index.html

I used to live in Melbourne so I have a few reasons to head back that way and I was just wondering if it was worth a look.

It might give me a reason to finally do something worthy of releasing

Cool! I plan on going and releasing something, no idea what as yet though...

Forgive my ignorance (I've never been to a demo party) but when people 'release something' at one of these parties, is it coded from scratch during the event or do you bring something finished along with you?

If they're coded from scratch...
Can you bring pre-made code? 
Can you use your full range of home made content generation tools?

I've always been interested in these parties but I've never been aware of any close by so I haven't looked into the details

http://tv.gathering.org/page/1/view/5100886 this might help you as well It's a seminar I gave at The Gathering last year about this sort of thing.

Sorry to go off topic a little here but I just watched this (well I did last night) and you did a great job there Ferris!  I really enjoyed it and took away some useful info!

Btw, Elevated (by RGBA) blew me away.

Very cute!

Nice work

I think 2010 is still the current Visual Studio.
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us

How did you find MoSync?  I've seen it mentioned but never really had a proper look at it.

Any chance you could get a picture of the cube on the SGS1 and on the SGS2?  If we can see the differences we might be able to tell what's going wrong.

Which version of Android is on the SGS1?  I think they came with either 2.1 or 2.2

Do you know if it's using GLES 1 or 2?

2D: SDL / SFML / Allegro / XNA (C#)
3D: OpenGL / DirectX / OpenSceneGraph / Ogre / XNA (C#)

Even if you do 3D I would highly recommend using SDL, it takes away a lot of the nasty OpenGL setup

Remember, converting to Android probably means you will have to re-write in Java, and iPhone you'd need to re-write in Objective C.

My current game engine is written mostly in c/c++ and works fine on iOS and Android with the same code.
You do need to write a wrapper class that creates your c++ object and calls it's functions, but that code can be re-used for all of your projects, so it's only a pain the first time

I basically have a Game class (c++) and the wrapper (java for Android, obj-c for iOS) create a Game and then call it's Game->Update() and Game->Render().

The wrapper does have to handle all of the input and pass that through to the c++ object, so any touch events, etc. will have to be captured in your wrapper and passed through to your c++ class.

Hi Marlon,

Any iPhone from the 3GS forward has GLES 2 support, all the versions before that only supported GLES 1.1, which is still perfectly fine, it's just lacking shaders.

I believe any Android 2.1 or higher device will support GLES 2 whereas the earlier versions will only support 1.1

I personally have an iPhone 3GS and a Motorola XT5 which is running Android 2.1 (update 1).

I bought the XT5 specifically because it was at the lower end of the spec sheet and for my 2D tests it's been holding up fine but I still need to test my 3D stuff on it to see how it really performs.

I haven't used one myself but I've heard very good things about the Samsung Galaxy devices.  My mate has one so I'll see if I can get him to run some of my code and get some feedback for you

I find Android MUCH nicer to work with.  I can dev on my Mac, my Linux box or my Windows box.  I can just copy the file to the device and run it.

For iOS I'm forced into X-Code and forced into using my Mac which I find painful, although it's mostly moral issues rather than complexity issues

The other issue I have with iOS is that when I create something it has to be signed and the certificates run out every 6 months so if you want to keep your app permenantly on your phone you either have to keep uploading it or you have to release it to the iTunes store and then buy it.

Really, imho, you can't go wrong with either OS.  If you go Android just make sure you buy a phone with enough specs for what you want to use it for, you will easily find one with iOS specs for no extra cost.

Ok,  I decided against UltraEdit just because I didn't want to pay for it

As for WinASM Studio, I downloaded an alternate FASM build from the forum which my AV picked up as a couple of viruses.

I searched their forum and found that other people had the same thing and they decided it was a false positive.

I'm just hoping you can confirm that it's safe rbz.  Or is it easy enough for me to just setup FASM myself? (the MASM build didn't show any potential viruses).

Lastly I also went and downloaded MASM from Microsoft and found that it requires VS2005 to be installed!  So I'll be sticking with FASM

Thanks rain!

I'll grab that, UltraEdit and WinAsm right now.

I don't think I have anything planned this weekend so I'm going to try and get something (not sure what yet) written so that I can have more problems for your all to sort out

Btw, I've always had a natural fear of try / catch.  Is it pretty common for people to use them in asm?

I think my fear comes from the first time I saw try / catch.  It was some java apps that used them for program flow and I really think that's a bad idea just because I found it hard to read and hard to visualise what was actually going to happen.  Java developers would probably think the same thing about some of my horrible c hacks though

Keep in mind that the iPhone uses GLES, not regular GL.  They are fairly similar though.  I have done a little iPhone game dev so feel free to fire any questions if you get stuck.

Another note is that I think you can only use XNA from C#?  So it would be pretty difficult to re-use code between iPhone and PC if you were planning to do that.

Finding out how to do thing and in what order is even harder. For example setting up your render buffers must be done in the correct order. If you dont do it correct it will probably not work on some card. Usually ATI cards.

I have had this issue in the past with GL using the same hardware but different versions of drivers