The end of an Era, the dawn of the future!

Hello world.

Sorry for not keeping this blog up-to-date, let me tell you what has happend since the last post! First of, I'm done with the iPhone app development ( for now at least.. ). I had a couple of reasons for leaving the iPhone "dev-circle". The biggest reason is the fact that Apple turned down a lot of people with the iOS 4.0. I was very exited on the release day, installed it directly on my iPhone ( a 3G ) and at first it was good. But during the week I tried it out I started noticing how my phone was getting slowdowned and frozed a lot more often than usuall. My battery drained even though I didn't use it for more then just checking the time/surfing. I was also not aware that Apple took away all the features that made iOS4 interesting, like the multitasking/background picture for the springboard.

My resoultion? I jailbroke my iPhone and it's really alot better, I get the same features as in iOS4 but I can use my phone and the battery last as good as it was day one! I really enjoy all the extra stuff you can do with an "open" iPhone. And no, just because I jailbroke my iPhone, that does not mean that I'm a pirate now. What I think most people fails to understand is the fact that when you have jailbroken your phone it doesn't include any way to download pirated apps. If you want to join the "darkside" you will have to add additional sources ( a form of repositories ) in Cydia. So don't hate the jailbreakers, hate the pirates! I've downloaded alot of apps, both from the Cydia store and the AppStore, I have NEVER downloaded an pirated app!

Ok, now where done with the iPhone. What's next? Well, I'm currently unemployed ( HIRE ME!!!! ) so I will be focusing on building my portfolio and learning a lot of new stuff! First up, Xbox Live Indie! I will try to post some updates on this blog during my tries :) More info will come when I have something neat to show.

Bye! For now....^^

Joakim

Project GnipGnop!

New project!
I'm currently working on a simple 2D multiplayer game, the 3D racing project is put on ice untill I find some time to restructure some of my code. I'm still using my engine for the 2D project, so it's still evolving!

The new project will be using the GameKit that Apple supplies. GameKit is used to connect two or more i-devices with either Bluetooth or by Wi-Fi/Cellular network. I will start with implementing the Bluetooth connection, and the game will be for 2 players. The game will be really similar to the classic game "Pong", I want to keep it simple and polished this time so expect a lot of nice effects :)

That's all for now, will post some screens when there is something to show!

Joakim


-- Posted From My iPhone

Some Good News and Some Bad...

So last weekend I discovered that something is wrong with my texture-coordinates in my model-class. I spent the saturday trying to find out where the problems, still haven't found it. Then I tried to workout the normals/lighting, turns out I still need to read up a bit on that subject though...

So then I turned to another thing I will be needing in order to create a good game engine for the iPhone, I'm talking about sound. My first though was to use the Apples' SystemSound, but there was some major limitations to that, such as not being able to use soundclips that are longer than 30 seconds and perhaps the biggest limitation, that SystemSound isn't played immediately but put in one of Apples' queues. So I decided to go with OpenAL. I found a couple of great tutorials that showed the basics, then I tried setting it up.

Right now I can load in a soundclip and have several different "sources/speakers" play that soundclip. I have a couple of more things I would like to add 3D sound, either using OpenALs or making my own. Oh yeah, I did another concept-sketch!

That's all for now, I really want to get the engine ready for production now!! Excpect more more info soon :)

Joakim Rosenstam

Concept Sketch!

I made a small sketch for my next project earlier today, expect more to come!







No coding update today!

Joakim Rosenstam

-- Posted From My iPhone

A small update

Hello dear Reader!

I've been working some more with the Engine ( still haven't figured out a name ) and I've started to work on a .obj model loader! So far it's pretty slow and the rendering of models still needs a bunch of optimizations, but I'm able to load a triangulated .obj file, with textureCoordinates and normals. I haven't started the work on lighting/normals, but all the info from the .obj is being loaded correctly into the engine.


As you saw on the screenshots in my last update, I got particleEmitters up and running. I will need to rewrite them too use VBOs. Same thing goes for the models. I feel like my framework is growing bigger and bigger, which is great, but I will need to make sure everything works and is easy to use.


When I'm done with models, lighting and sound, the framework is usable and I will try to make something cool in it! I got a few ideas.. Feel free to send me an email if you have any questions about the engine or if you just feel lonely and need someone to send cute mails to!

That's all for now, will try to start post more regular updates. Thanks for reading and showing intrest in my work, I'm out!

Joakim Rosenstam


-- Posted From My iPhone

Framework/Engine news!

Hello everyone, I spoke (very shortly) about the new "Framework"

I've been busy working on in the last update, I feel like it's time to show how far along I've come. First thing first, the framework has turned into something much closer to a game-engine then a framework so from now on I will refer to it as a Engine. I made the engine from the ground-up, I use a mix of C and Obj-C to create all the classes that I need.

I got a lot of help from two really good friends, Tommy Vågbratt and Arvid Binder

Ekedahl, and if you guys ever read this, you should know that I'm really thankfull for everything you taught me :). The first

thing I made were a vector and a matrix class, they aren't fully optimized but they are good enough for me. I then carried on with creating a core for the engine, I made alot of small utility classes such as color and vertex classes. I then carried on creating a camera class, and some other neat things to be able to get the most out of Open-GL.

At first I used the same setup on rendering as in the example of Open-GL that Apple provides

(a NSTimer that calls a specified function in a specified

time interval). I had some major problems with that though, I could not get the rendering over 20-30 fps, even when I specified a higher rendering frequency. I also read alot about the way/when NSTimer calls the function specified by the coder and I don't believe that this is a safe way to go for a game-engine.

The way I handle, update/render right now is fairly simple. On startup a second thread is started that updates and renders all game

data. This means that I can choose if I want a locked interval of update/render calls or if I simply want to update/render as fast as the iPhone/iPod can.

If you look close at the screenshots you will notice that the newer

ones miss the debugtext, this is a issue that I bumped into when switching to a multithreaded approach. Apperantly all uiobjects, such as

UILabel, have to be updated in the main-thread. So that is on my todo-list.

Well that pretty much everything so-far!

Am I keeping somethings hidden/unexplained?

Of course I am! There will be plenty of updates on my new project/projects, just wait for it :)

Joakim Rosenstam

And yeah, if you have any questions/comments/ideas

toss me an email

(joakim.rosenstam@hotmail.com)

and I will answer as fast as possible!

10.000+ Downloads!

Just want to thank everybody that downloaded my apps. The total count of downloads is now: 10.986, with an avarage of 50 downloads per day! To celebrate this success two of my apps are now made free and will stay free for ever, if you haven't downloaded iKeepScore and iThinkQuick already, do it now, they are free :).

iSpark is still available so if you like sparkly and shiny things, take a look at it.

The news flow has been a bit dry, this is due to the fact that I've been realocted and quite busy at work. But do not fear, I'm in the middle of creating a framework that will allow me to make more apps, faster than before. More news on this will come soon.

Thanks to the guys over at AppFigures for the great stats compiler!

Have a great weekend!

-Joakim