Articles filed under ‘Development Diary’
Multisample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) on iOS
Currently a lot of the technology is complete for Project Iota – we’ve got the main physics system working, which manages bomb placement and how the buildings collapse with the rest of the scenery reacting accordingly.
In the coming weeks we will be throwing a few tweaks around to make sure the physics are both challenging and fun. I will talk more about how the physics have been put together in the future once more media of the game has been released.
Recently I took a break from game code and decided to try and get Multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA) working on iOS. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Due to the default renderer on iOS rendering to a Framebuffer Object (FBO) all that was required was to create another FBO and a multi-sample render buffer and just get the draw loop to render to the new FBO and resolve and display into the normal FBO.
Here’s are the results…
Whether this effect makes it into the final game is unknown. We will need to do a profiling step to make sure we still have time to render the MSAA and process the rest of the models. At the moment it seems a little expensive especially with the amount of objects we have to render and process.
Dev Diary #2: Texture Atlasing
One of the recent additions to our tool chain is the ability to create texture atlases.
Texture Atlasing is a concept whereby you place multiple textures into a single bigger texture or textures so that you drastically reduce your texture binding and swaps during the rendering of a complex scene.
Atlasing has existed for a while and has been used on many older games as a primary technique — the Quake games for example started using atlasing for a level’s lightmap information. We have recently been looking into this technique because we have increased our texture usage, plus atlasing has a lot of benefits on devices such as the iPhone where texture bandwidth is limited.
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Dev Diary #1: Core Tech
Over the coming weeks as we continue development on our next game – and in an attempt to get into the habit of updating our web site more regularly! – we will be posting a series of development diaries. These diaries will not only allow us to document our progress for our own benefit, but we hope will provide other indie developers with an insight into how we work – which may prove beneficial when applying our development concepts to their own projects.
In our first dev diary we will cover some of our core tech that we have been developing on and off since our first release in 2008. To illustrate our tech we will be showing off a prototype that we were working on called “H3”.
Click here to read this article…
