Unity ROCKS and loading time problems with Solitaire Siege

Hello,

  I hope you are all having a good week.

It’s going to be a really quick blog today I’m afraid as I feel really ill at the moment and I think I’m going to go straight to bed for an early night and try to shake it off.

  It’s been a fairly poor week all round this week I’m afraid.  The best part of this week is that I’ve been playing around with a new engine called Unity (www.unity3d.com) and it’s great.  I’ve already bought the Main part of it and I’m looking at the iPhone add for it now.  After using the Torque iTGB, I wasn’t expecting that much from Unity to be honest seeing as TGB is basically as simple as you can get (or so I assumed), but Unity is 1000 times better from what I can see.  Within 20 minutes I had a large textured terrain covered with trees and grass that blows in the wind and I was able to run around it.  All this with just watching a couple of little videos of the site to get me started.

  I spent yesterday trying out the iPhone module for it and that is also really, really nice as well.  Some of the demos are really impressive and you can even try the iPhone game without even sending it to the iPhone, you just use the iPhone to control the game and the MAC sends a (reduced size, but then enlarged so it looks a bit blocky) video feed back to the iPhone, which is really handy for when you want to try the control system out without having to constantly build the app in Unity / Xcode.

  So I’m really thinking now that once the games I have planned for the iPhone using iTGB are done, I’m going to move over to Unity for doing iPhone stuff at least.  I’m still going to be using TGB for Lucky 7 as that game is almost finished and it would be daft to not finish it as it’s a smart, fun game.

  Also, Unity allows you to build your games for the web, so don’t be to surprised if in the future, you start to see some little test games popping up on here.

Weekending 14/06/09

Solitaire Siege:

  I’ve spent what seems like most of this week trying to get Solitaire Siege to load up quickly.  I’ve spent about 3-4 days on this so far and I’ve got it down from around about 100 seconds, down to about 42 - 43 seconds, which is still way, way too long.  It should be loading up in under 20 seconds.  I’ve tried everything I can think of from converting as much of the gf/x as possible from PNG files to PVR files which knock the size down and can be used straight away by the iPhone / iPod with out having to mess around with them like it does with PNG files.  The down side is they can look really bad on clean / cartoon images (which is most of my graphics in the game).  If you have ever compressed a SPG file down real low, then that’s the same kind of effect you’ll get with PVRs.  It’s fine for photos, but not for nice, clean 2D sprites.  This took 2 days to do and it didn’t make any difference to the loading times, so I’m going to change them back.

  I’ve got a video of the game in action now, but I still need to look into how to convert it for YouTube.

Shuffle Blocks:

  Dave is back on course for doing the XBOX port of the code again and I’ve done a little bit more on the gf/x side of things, but with been on call this week, I’ve been going to bed early in case I get called out during the night, which really eats into your time during the week, but saying that, I’ve almost finished updating the gf/x now.  Just a few more renders to do.

  There was one problem we had this week of trying to convert the new font over for the game.  Dave spent almost two days trying to get it to go in and the fault was because I had a couple of characters slightly higher then the others, so it wouldn’t import correctly.  It’s amazing how such a stupid little things like that can cause such a huge problem =/

Well I’m afraid that’s it from me for this week as I really need to go to bed now as I’m ready to drop, so I hope you have a good week and I’ll see you next week.

Take care,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

This entry was posted on 14/06/2009 at 07:47 pm and is filed under Solitaire Siege, Shuffle Blocks, Current Game Development, Lucky 7 Development Diary, Blogroll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.