Forgotten Memories - A psychological survival horror game.

[kukulcan]

Originally Posted by bebo_beta2002

woow...so the game nw will run on 3gs??

I was surprised how much the performance jump from 3G to 3GS was, while the jump from 3GS to 4 was rather a non jump when you take resolution into consideration - like iPad 2 to iPad 3.

[tatoforever]

Originally Posted by Sidgoku123

yeah i'll not be missing out on your game for sure.
on another note what do you think about allowing players to adjust the visual quality like soft shadows and filtering mode and stuff,that way you would not have to optimise the game for each and every device.

Basically, we have two rigs one for low end devices and one for high-end.
Each configuration scales to the given device more or less.
But that's the idea, let the user set their options as they wish. However, don't expect to run dynamic soft-shadows on a 3GS device. XD

[Wediafom24]

Please work on making this a universal release. A strong selling point....

[tatoforever]

Originally Posted by kukulcan

I was surprised how much the performance jump from 3G to 3GS was, while the jump from 3GS to 4 was rather a non jump when you take resolution into consideration - like iPad 2 to iPad 3.

For the iPad3 we are not running the game at retina resolution. We are running the game at 1024*768 (upscaled to fill the entire screen) with hardware MSAA and FXAA (as a post-filter) to avoid aliasing. Still miles faster than running at full resolution without AA. For the iPad2, we are running at native resolution (1024*768) with FXAA.

[tatoforever]

Originally Posted by Wediafom24

Please work on making this a universal release. A strong selling point....

That's the plan, one game for multiple devices.

[kukulcan]

Originally Posted by Wediafom24

Please work on making this a universal release. A strong selling point....

I applaude devs going universal. But strong selling point, not really, as you only make those happy who own both, while the others feel like they pay extra for a second device they do not own.

[Wediafom24]

Originally Posted by tatoforever

That's the plan, one game for multiple devices.

Thank you.

Originally Posted by kukulcan

I applaude devs going universal. But strong selling point, not really, as you only make those happy who own both, while the others feel like they pay extra for a second device they do not own.

I don't think you understand what universal is. Its the ability to download a single app across all devices without any restrictions. Look at Rockstar's GTA3 and Max Payne.
Anyway, it's a win win for players with a single device or a multiple devices, it doesn't matter.

[Sidgoku123]

Originally Posted by tatoforever

Basically, we have two rigs one for low end devices and one for high-end.
Each configuration scales to the given device more or less.
But that's the idea, let the user set their options as they wish. However, don't expect to run dynamic soft-shadows on a 3GS device. XD

yeah soft shadows are power consuming.well I don't really think we need that for lower end devices,but please manage a good framerate,It really is important.

[kukulcan]

Originally Posted by Wediafom24

I don't think you understand what universal is. Its the ability to download a single app across all devices without any restrictions. Look at Rockstar's GTA3 and Max Payne.
Anyway, it's a win win for players with a single device or a multiple devices, it doesn't matter.

I think I do. Would there be freedom to do all versions that would be perfect. Let's say a developer would sell the iPhone version for $1.99, the iPad for $2.99 and just to be nice the universal version for $3.99.

That is as long as the developer takes care to optimize each version for the device. Then all those who would never think about getting an iPad ever could profit from still only paying half the price. And much better, there would be no need for them to download iPad Retina assets (which can be rather huge).

And universal is not better all the time. To save hassle either the versions are just scaled or the iPad version uses the extra space for useless decoration instead of having the UI optimized for both. Not a big deal if you have a huge name, take lke $9.99 anyway and UI compared to licence is jsut a very small part of development.

For our travel apps I wish we never went universal. If we put all the stuff in for retina resolution the app goes up to 200-300MB , which the iPhone users load too. Or we do our own downloading routine that puts some 100-200MB trafiic on our server for every iPad 3 user.

There would be an easy solution, like adding universal support as InApp purchase with the additional assets being on Apple's servers.

[tatoforever]

Yesterday, we've managed to keep hard shadows from not blowing away the 3GS devices. It will be hard to do full scene shadows on the iPad1 (which is the most difficult one to optimize due to the large screen size). What I'm probably going to do is render the screen at 70% and upscale, that will really improve rendering speed. Then I'll see how performance goes like that, if good, I'll will leave hard shadows on the iPad1 enabled by default.
I've also put two guys optimizing scenes assets. We will end up having two versions of the most heavy-critical assets. There's some other stuff that low-end devices may be missing by default, which are motion blur, refraction, reflections, to name a few.
By default, the game will detect your device and automatically choose the correct asset for you, but you can still switch quality as you wish. From there, I'm not responsible for slowdowns or crashes. :P