CommanderData, Thans for the lengthy response. Cavern switched to CALayer drawing in 1.3, which improved performance quite nicely (and made animations a bit nicer as they happen in correct layer), but still I'm not very happy with the speed on first gen devices and frankly you would expect a tile based graphics to perform well even on the low-end hardware. Performance hit comes from the three layers used for terrain rendering: floor (which can have two passes per tile), shadow and wall - I guess that Rogue Touch uses only one layer for this. There are some tricks that could be done to speed up CoreGraphics drawing: 1) Pre-render two-pass tiles. This would use more memory but would be quite easy to do. Maybe 5-15% performance gain. The problem is that you can easily have hundreds of combinations for tiles. 2) Draw only required tiles when moving around. Would require to change layers to CATiledLayers. This would likely to give huge boost but would need a new way to do shadows to avoid rendering artifacts (as shadow tile overlaps its neighbour tiles) 3) Make shadows optional. Would give a 30-40% performance gain but then again it's kind of lazy solution. OpenGL rendering would solve performance since it would be very fast to draw three layers as a vertex grid that could use a single texture (all terrain tiles fit into 512x512 texture) The problem is that I'm not sure how well OGL view would mix with UIKit stuff (ie. all dialogs etc) and in any case I would have to rewrite animation engine for OpenGL. Writing whole gui for OpenGL is something I wont be doing with Cavern, maybe next game then. I think I'll do couple test this weekend to see how well OpenGL plays with other gui elements and if it looks good I'll do the switch in future versions of Cavern. Dienekes, Being on "New and noteworthy" gave about 1000% boost to sales. When Cavern dropped to "What's hot" box, sales were cut about 30%. When iPad launched, What's hot section was flushed but sales are still quite a bit higher than before featuring. So that was nice thing for Apple to do. (However, I'm bit embarrased that they picked 1.4 which was very buggy)
I'm sure you've heard of it; any reason you're not looking at Cocos2D for iPhone as a graphics engine? It uses OpenGL, and has pretty much everything you'd need in a 2D game. Sure -- it's a lot of work to port this game, but maybe next game. It supports mixing of UIKit/OpenGL as of a few versions ago. Definitely take a look if you haven't.
lazyzpeon, I've been checking Cocos2D now and then (last time couple months ago so I'm not sure how it has evolved) but the issue has been that it's quite realtime-oriented (also textureatlas drawing was quite limited). Good thing is that it's fast and has a very nice animation framework. Maybe I'll take a look at newest version. However, I usually prefer to do things myself so I can learn "how things work" I did a quick test with simulator and ogl works fine with uikit guis, so that does not seem to be problem. Didn't test it with device though so I don't know if it behaves differently (or if context switches take big performance hit) I'll spend some more time on this later today...
Just did some tests with swapping map view of Cavern to animated opengl layer. Seems to work perfectly (even on device, my 1st gen iPod touch gives okay framerates) all dialogs work as they should too. So, definetely something I will be implementing in near future.
Texture atlas support is much better now, and there is a really nice tool called Zwoptex (zwoptex.zwopple.com) to help you build the spritesheets, that's integrated with Cocos. That said, I also appreciate the 'knowing how it works' aspect too
Great game! The slow down is a real pain when you are waiting a few minutes for an arrow or spell to come and hit you --- got over that by using a repel scroll so they wont fire at me! How about implementing dual wield? There are 2 slots for weapons....I though of this after the crab kept hitting me twice....then I though...hey why cant I do that!
I'm working on slowdowns, resolved a ton of memory leaks during weekend. Will likely release maintenance update this week. Dual wielding is something that I've thought but haven't figured out good way to keep it from being way too overpowered. Future versions will likely introduce skills/traits/perks for characters and dual wielding would be one of those.
I have had a fierce crash twice. Both times, Cavern crashed while I was in combat. Open the app back up and it doesn't reenter the dungeon. Instead, it goes right to the main 'new adventure' menu. I checked my hall of fame and I wasn't killed. It seems to have just wiped the save state clean. Very, very frustrating. I'm scared to invest any playtime for fear of it vanishing. It's too bad, too. You're working on a very playable and intriguing game here.
frogtorch, Could you send crashreports via iTunes, haven't seen combat crashes with 1.4.5. Also, if you can remember if the crashes happened with any specific monster or any other extra information would be helpful. I'll do playtrough testing this evening and see if I can replicate it. 1.4.6 will be submitted today. There are no visible changes but it fixes huge memory leaks with level generation. Also, only one map is kept in memory at a time so memory footprint should stay pretty static when descending deeper. Seems to take care of slowdowns.
Certainly. I will try to figure out how to submit a crash log. I will futz with it tonight if I can. Thank you.
I just finally picked this up, and after spending many hours with Rogue Touch and Fargoal the controls are taking some getting used to. I do like the graphics a lot and it seems to be hard as heck, which I guess is a good thing. I love the opening screen, looks very epic, and the shops, and the way you can customize your character. I'm also impressed by the level of support the dev has given it. Anyway, I'll offer more impressions and thoughts on it once I've played some more. So far it has been two quick deaths for me...
Yeah the game is great but the crashing and slowdown really suck. Dont get me wrong I have beaten it 3 times...I keep playing it by how could this get through the approval process with such horrible crashes. It has crashed on me 6 times in a row as I try to restart the game. Then it just erased my game and made me start again...I was so close with the mage with awesome equipment and a pack full of healing potions. Hint drop healing potions near the stairs and ditch the portal stone once you pick up the mysterious object..as you cant use it one you touch the myserious thingy. Please fix these horrible memory leaks..the game gets too slow and the only way to fix it seems to power down the ipod.
Hello all, Sorry for silence, I've been very busy with my daytime work due to unexpected rearrangements. Anyways, 1.4.6 update is not yet submitted but it's ready and will submit it today. Some future plans : As the 1.4.6 version will likely resolve most bugs and issues, I thought that this might be a good slot to do a Lite version. Current plan is that Lite will include completely different level content and single player class that is different from the three that full version has. Items and monsters will likely be lifted from the full version. After that, work continues on 1.5. As said before, It's a quite large content and gameplay update. And to all testers, you haven't been forgotten, I will be in touch with you as development progresses.
I have not figured out yet how to get the game from crashing and losing all the game data but I found out that once the game slows down just disable the walking sounds and it picks right back up again....nothing worse that returning with the object and having the game dump on ya! Cant wait for the upadte!
Having played more since my last post, I am liking the game, although it can get tedious returning to town so often. I pretty much have to return to town at least once for every floor I descend due to the non-regenerating HP and item weight restriction. Can anyone give me tips so I may not have to go back and forth so often?
Save up 125$ and buy the portal stone. You can use this and it does not use a turn....I went to town and back 3 times while infront of an enemy. I just store all the extra potions and equipment at the portal stone in town...you can come and get it whenever ..drop you antidote potions close to the portal though. I usually just keep 1 antidote...1 bless and 1 repel potion and I max out my restore potions. But when I get anything new I usually have to drop my weapons and armour to pick them up....It would be nice to change that..like equiped items weight less than uneqiped items....having smaller bags that you can keep extra rings and potions it....a storage box back in town. There is one box in the store that it locked and I cant figure out if it opens or not. But it is getting frusterating....after the game freezes and stops 3 times it erases your game data....I have lost too many games to count but I keep coming back for me....lets hope the new update does a better job of saving the game data and has less slowdown and crashes!
That's a good idea, cheers for that. By the way, I have to show you this video, if only due to your name and location. I hope you don't mind, but every time I see you post I will have to also post: OH MY GOD, CASNADIAN DESTROYA! PARRANOYAAAAAAAAAA!
After being a week in review queue, 1.4.6 was rejected due to "crashing when clicking anything on main menu" Very odd bug related to online highscores which I couldn't reproduce but figured out the reason from crash logs and just resubmitted. Let's hope for quick re-review. In other news, I ported Cavern editor to native OS X app last weekend, and now the editor and actual game has same shared dungeon generation code. (old Java editor did not have level generator code at all so testing content had to be done with iPhone simulator or device) Would be interesting idea to allow some kind of user-created adventures in (distant) future... Another new feature I spent some time on weekend is that Cavern now supports non-linear level structure, so it is possible for level to contain more than one exits (ie small sublevel) And last but not least, just stumbled upon a new (free) iPhone roguelike, POWDER by Jeff Lait. It's a port of gameboy version and frankly the gui is very, very crude. The game however is actually very nice and quite easy to get into, you guys should give it a spin. What impressed me most was the in-game tutorial, that is something Cavern lacks badly...
POWDER isn't free. He's charging ten dollars for it! It's an in-app purchase... Anyways, good to hear this game is still getting regular updates. It's my favorite roguelike on the Touch!
