We've been scrambling over at PikPok since the simulator release. A couple of issues to resolve with respect to compatibility, games using lower res assets than they should, and some stuff appearing in the wrong place under the new iPad. A few updates going in this week. We did manage to do a quick turnaround of one of our games and upres it for the new display size. The guys worked over the weekend so we could get an early submission in and hopefully hit launch. Fingers crossed. Now to work out how to get an actual iPad 3 down in NZ at launch...
Can you tell us what the root cause of such behavior was? I think it would be useful to people to know what might break. In theory, if one uses only points instead of pixels, nothing should break but then there is theory and there is practice. Thanks.
We have about 18 live games out there at the moment, several of which were written as far back as 2009 before Retina and iPad even existed. So issues have arisen out of some legacy code and a combination of a changing OS, changing hardware, bad practice, invalid assumptions, and shortcuts taken in short development timeframes. I don't know that there is one thing to point to that would really help people out other than continue to anticipate new handsets, tablets and OSes when it comes to writing code and designing interfaces so be as clean, well documented and extensible as possible.
Crazy Res Yeah the res is nuts, the file sizes for some of the larger background images in our games are going to be 3MB plus which will push the download size of our apps up by 4 or 5 times their current size. I can't see the benefits of the res going any higher now at least for the next few years, so I think it is worth targeting this new size to lengthen the life of your iPad apps and make them easily portable to smaller res devices as well. Even if the screen size gets bigger on iPhone or iPads the iPad 2 res will still look amazing even on a device twice the size.
I certainly expect that we have reached a limit here and I agree: there should be no benefits from an even higher resolution... Another thing... You know, Apple provides an automatic mechanism for loading textures for different resolutions and device families. You know "mytex@2x~iphone.png" and similar things. Ideally you just refer to "mytex" and iOS automatically locates and loads the right file. I found myself in a situation, where I should provide four different sets of files: iPhone, iPhone Retina, iPad and iPad Retina. But the iPhone Retina set was the same as the iPad one. I decided to override that automatic mechanism and make use of only three sets: small (iPhone), medium (iPhone Retina and iPad) and large (iPad Retina). Not that elegant, but I guess necessary.
I was wondering about this issue. I also have a load of assets that happen to be identical for Retina iPhone as on non-retina iPad, so am going to try this: texture.png [email protected] texture@[email protected] So for the iPhone I just refer to texture.png, but on the iPad I explicitly refer to [email protected], so that the Retina iPad will append @2x onto the filename (which just so happens to already be in the filename) and magically find texture@[email protected]. I'll report back if it doesn't work Incidentally, I really like how the home screen appears to scale up the higher-res 114px Retina-iPhone icon present in Universal apps that haven't got the 144px icon, as opposed to iPad only non-retina apps that double up the 72px icon. You can still tell they're not native res though. To see what I mean look at the Twitter icon - the bird looks kind of feathery due to the scaling.
Another thing I noticed is an app only supports the Retina scale factor for OpenGL on iPad if it was built with iOS SDK 5.1 (which came out when iPad was announced). Anything built with an earlier SDK will only support Retina for UIKit stuff like fonts and buttons etc. I tried my app on the simulator last week and was glad to see the OpenGL game ran Retina without any modification, but turns out that was only because I built it with 5.1. Trying the current build of my game on the iPad today shows OpenGL all running at 2x, but after being built with 5.1 it magically looks all crisp. Now to fix my 2D buttons
And ANOTHER thing I noticed is many website look pretty bad with 2x scaled images. Not bad, just you know, you can tell it's not pin-sharp. Even Apple's own website isn't fully retina-enabled on every page / image. They did the "Resolutionary" page though - you see the page load scaling 2x at first and then suddenly the Retina assets pop in a second later.
I will be as soon as the dev center opens back up so I can set this thing going Edit: strange I can access it on my PC.
Interestingly, my new iPad 3 loads the same level slower than the iPad 2. This was a very short test so not extremely conclusive. New iPad has nothing else loaded on it yet, has the exact same game build as the other iPad. The 3D scenes look great, nice and sharp. I'm going to up the anti-aliasing and see how that goes. Graphics are nice and sharp in general on the new iPad. I'd throw up a screenshot, but what's the point. It's huge! I had to use Windows to get to the provisioning portal, couldn't get to it on the mac.
I guess that should work like a charm. Nice idea! Yes, I think such icons would all look blurry. The next weeks will be interesting. I expect a lot of updates
I am satisfied with the new iPad. But I have to say that I am not "very satisfied". There is one thing that is not so nice: my iMac does not pump enough juice for the iPad. Thus "charging while developing" went out of the window... I have the small hope that a powered USB-hub could help. Any experiences?
