a new build Here's my new app icon, Some new screens of the latest build, most of the interfaces are now quite final. you can see the harvest and buff choice buttons above a relic, the evil eye icon when a unit is insecure, the stats and special ability buttons and some of the subtitles,, (voices are epic BTW, will post soon) Also some of the Special Ability cues are visible, spikes when a bodger is beseking, and for instance the glowing lance when first strike is activated, It's quickly grabbed shots so sometimes obscured by interfaces, hope you don't mind
No worries, that looks great! First time in ages I am interested in an RTS again (always liked turnbased better, and really getting too old (read:slow) for hectic stuff). Very interesting visual style. I really like the font you use for the messages at the bottom. And the "Gorm: Feast?" one made me grin. Job well done, sir! For the icon question: You already decided on the bottom one, my choice as well. Much clearer and less crowded. About the fps: User switchable 30/60/whatever sounds best to me. Also, I'd guess that a lower setting would keep it playable on older devices like my iPad2. Wonder if you can crack 100fps with the new iPad5... What is the native Hertz rate for iThingies displays? At least for monitors it is always best to match fps and Hertz. iThings shouldn't be any different.
Well, what you do is v- sync the fps tot the device screen update. Which on ios usually is either 30 or 60 fps. Actually the game now runs about 60 fps on iPad 2. Most games tend to aim for 30 fps on iOS I guess so plenty of performance left Gonna get me one of those ipad5s in November, so we'll find out. Unity3d doesn't support multithreaded rendering so its not a step forward directly related to brute processing force. But apple does Pull a lot of power from its chips. So if its anything below 100fps I'd be very disappointed.
Yep, vsync. Was wondering about the iThingies, because I read something recently that having a much higher framerate output (say, highend graphics card that can do 100+ fps with heavy games like Crysis) than the "native" 60Hz of most monitors causes its own set of problems when you have vsync on, like micro stutters. Because then the monitor needs to throw away frames that it cannot process, and apparently that is noticeable when the difference gets too large. And Unity really does not support multithreaded rendering? Ah well, hardware almost always was/is ahead of software. 64bit processors for PCs are over 10 years old now, but a lot of software - especially consumer stuff - still runs on 32bit only. Wouldn't be surprised if Apple at some point makes 64bit mandatory, just to push things farther... I got my eyes set on an iPad5 too. Can feel the 2 is getting outdated. Still surprised that you can get such an impressive framerate out of it. Your game does not exactly look lowend in the graphics department.
Indeed v sync can cause screen tearing and other issues. That's why its optional in most PC games. But having frame rates higher than your screen capabilities is still very useful, as your sampling the input and updating the physics solvers more often. That way fps games and racing games do feel more responsive and more accurate. Basically. If your coding moving objects you have to deal with an inaccuracy equal to the distance an object is moving between two frames. So when we used to write our own physics we had to do a lot of predictive or previous frame calculations to determine what kind of intersections in between frames, which adds more overhead etc etc. With higher frame rates the potential range for unknown intersections becomes smaller. So frame rate and vsync have a lot of non graphics consequences as well, especially when its all running on single threaded systems. Basically I believe(someone correct me if I'm wrong) unity can do multithreaded rendering, but this is not implemented for iOS and android. You can multithread your own code of course. I think the reason the iPad 2 still performs so well (and it really surprised me as well) is that the hardware Os combo is so strictly directed by apple, its really fine tuned to each other. If you control both hardware and Is, making the 64 bit jump is a lot easier , and not something we're going to see real soon for such a fragmented platform as android (and I love developing for android . But for Oberon's Court I think the lack of textures is making the drawcalls lighter as very little memory is used, so it can all be done on the fastest registers of the memory. But that's just a guess. But as far as I'm concerned. Straight untextured poly art is the new pixel art for this reason ( plus its a lot quicker to make than regular 3d assets)
Thanks for the taking the time to write such a good explanation, Muppet! I am not a programmer, but I know the basics. I like to understand how my stuff works, so I sponge it up whenever I read indepth explanations of how e.g. the different rendering mechanisms or physics approaches work. And something always sticks I don't like Amsterdam (too big for my taste), but here's an idea for you, see if you like it: if my girlfriend doesn't mind, I can hop over on a weekend when you start betatesting. It's only an hour away from where we live in Gelderland. Always good for giving feedback when you have the developer sitting right next to you.
Hehehe, no problem.. I'm quite solo on the whole devving, but If you give me your Device type and UID(if its IOS).. And I'll make sure to get the first playable build for testing. Cheers, and thanks for the offer..
A quick test of Oberon, some placeholder animation and visual FX Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel
A new wallpaper A full 2K+ HD wallpaper for your Ipad gen 3 or your new Ipad Air.. click for full image
Level Editing and a new cut-scene test So got around to finishing up my fast level editing code.. here's an image explaining how it works: and a new render-test for the cutscenes (in-engine, and a bit darker , cuz youtube) Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel
Great work, I really like your dark visual style. Does Oberon have really small legs for that huge upper body, or do I see that wrong?
Its hard to tell in this particular test, but he's basically a weasel/fox, so he's stretched out, and being gripped by a giant hand, Which is both his torture device, as well as his cape.. (sounds weird, and it is..)
Oh, I didn't even know there was a TA thread for this. I've been following this game on TIGforums. Looking good!
Thanks, Is Indie game Enthusiast your blog? cuz that's one well-filled blog. surely a well picked name. Cheers..
Thank you and yup, I'm the author. But back to your game. I absolutely love the art style. Very atmospheric and stylized. Will you be beta testing?
I've postponed my beta a bit, As I want also some of the campaign context, menu's, unit maintenance and upgrade meta game in there.. All that's fleshing out as we speak, and going quite rapidly. Doing the core mechanics was by far the most time consuming. Now it's time to add all the little touches that keep players engaged and entertained over time. So still planning a beta pretty soon, but there's a high probability it will be an android Beta. Simply because my apple dev account is filled up with devices from my dayjob ;. But it might take as much as a month to get there, which displaces the release to early next year, instead of december.. sorry for the long answer, short answer: yes, but not this month sadly(as was planned)
