Developing iPhone Games for Longer Battery Life

[ed_welch]

Hi All,
You might be interested in an article I wrote for GameDev recently:
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/pro.../iPhoneBatSave

It shows how we made our game "Armageddon Wars" battery friendly by dynamically throttling the frame rate during game play.

[sid187]

im not a dev.. i only know C and my back ground in that was unix systems etc.. but your article is very well written and makes complete sence.. congrats on a well written article.

chris.

[ed_welch]

Originally Posted by sid187

im not a dev.. i only know C and my back ground in that was unix systems etc.. but your article is very well written and makes complete sence.. congrats on a well written article.

chris.

thanks

[Bersaelor]

Hey,

many thanks for the cool idea!

As my app is turn based, as long as there is no animation going on, I can just render at 1 FPS.

This was really easy to incorporate and might save a lot of battery power, especially for those players who look at a game situation for quite a while to figure out the best move!

[CommanderData]

Great article, and I agree with it completely. It's surprising how many people who started coding in the last few years have no concept of efficiency- careful use of RAM, CPU (and nowadays, the GPU) can impact more than just game performance, but how long you actually get to play it on battery power.

Rogue Touch took this to the extreme over a year ago- when not actively processing a character or monster move it runs at *zero* fps (due to my use of CALayers and CG drawing calls)!

You can play RT for a very long time on a charge

Spirit Hunter Mineko and Rogue Touch EX are already using concepts similar to your article as well. Since these two are animated OpenGL based games they are set to run at 30 FPS when necessary. Spirit Hunter Mineko's idle animations are pretty complex, so I'm using 12 FPS at idle. Rogue Touch EX will probably be more like 6 FPS at idle.

I wish I had the time and patience to blog and write articles like this, but I don't... so big props for doing this! The more people that adhere to these ideas, the longer everyone can game "on the go"

[ed_welch]

That's interesting. I didn't realise other people were doing it as well.

[Mondae]

Yes, I agree one hundred percent. With the current limited battery, I enjoy when a developer focuses on making battery life extended.

[Mew2468]

Originally Posted by CommanderData

Rogue Touch took this to the extreme over a year ago- when not actively processing a character or monster move it runs at *zero* fps (due to my use of CALayers and CG drawing calls)!

"Hey, my computer can run Crysis at over 60 FPS!"

"Yeah, that's cool, but my iPhone runs Rogue Touch at 0 FPS. Owned!"