Nah, it's all our own engine code. We already have a partial rendertarget solution available but we'd prefer to add dynamic shadows tbh - unless it's perfect retina there are other things we can do to make the game look better on iPad 3, kinda where I came in.
It's equally in every device's max potential to run more effects at a lower resolution, or to trade resolution for scene complexity. One shouldn't get too attached to pixels - if utilizing the max resolution of the device was a key criterion for playing game, very few games from the current best-sellers on consoles would qualify. Games with such brands attached as Halo, Call of Duty, GTA, WipeOut, Assassin's Creed, Bioshock etc. have all traded resolution for frame-rates.
Yes. I completely agree. Wtf is with the obsession for ridiculously high resolutions?? I'd much rather have a better framerate and or more effects. Or render at an in between resolution if iPad 2 and 3.
I use packed formats. Using floats and such will destroy the framerate. Mutant Storm is very efficient to collapse draw calls into each other. But one of the biggest gains that worked for me for dynamic changes to vertices was to have one vertex buffer pool that gets mapped at the beginning of the frame and gets filled. Also I don't use the hardware for skinning or lighting and use the CPU for that - the CPU is not the real issue here... By grouping all the textures into one giant texture atlas you can draw most of the geometry with a few draw calls, using the same state changes. Internally the GPU is not doing many state changes and by doing this it can run very efficiently. Alpha polygons use a very nice trick I picked up from Luke Ryan when I was at True Axis. Normally you want to use 2 different blend states to simulate dark or light effects. You can build the blend modes/math into the texture data and vertex colour data and just set a certain blend mode up on initialisation. Then have all your alpha textures into a supper texture atlas that will cope with the light and dark effects. You still have to sort them but CPU power is fine on the iPad3 and just draw all alpha with one draw call. That way the GPU can run without state changes while processing alpha. This is only a gloss over but the outlines above will boost performance through the roof. In other words you need to think of better ways to collapse state changes into each other for full Retina displays. Mutant Storm draws everything between 14 to 20 draw calls.
Sounds good. Sadly almost none of that can apply to my game - the textures are already packed but still take up shedloads of space with 40+ different units possible on screen etc. I think our game is pretty much a pathological case tbh.
You don't sit a foot and a half away from your TV, though. It's all about viewing distance, so you can't really compare the two.
I beg to differ, this thread has a strong analogy to the complaints of how lazy/greedy/incompetent console developers don't utilize the Cell to its full potential and give PS3 gamers all their FullHD pixels. Everyone can tell the difference between 640p and 1080p in the living room, right?
