For details, see here.

Coming soon, my first iPhone game.

It’s an old-school block breaker style game, but takes advantage of the powerful iPhone hardware to add some new features.

It includes:

• Realistic physics
• Power ups that let real world gravity affect the in-game physics
• Moving blocks

And now for some screen shots:

I will update with a link when it becomes available.

I have finally got back to making some changes on my 3D Breakout project. It now has per-pixel lighting through using shaders with the ball acting as a point light source.

This first image shows a basic per-pixel lighting effect.

This second image shows attenuated lighting where the distance from the light source affects the brightness of the light falling on the surface.

Just as importantly, it has made it easier to make changes to the appearance of the game. Adding the lives and level display was very straight forward and improving the look of it is simply a matter of getting some better art assets. I’ve also added some indicators on the walls that make it easier to see where the paddle is.

I’ve added displaying of the level and number of lives, although it’s only with text so far and no fancy images.

I am currently working on refactoring the rendering system as the original drawing code had some problems. I spotted this when I tried increasing the number of bricks in the level and watched the frame-rate plummet as a result. By doing a quick test of commenting out first the drawing and then the physics code I was able to work out that the drawing code was responsible for the slow down.

Technical details below the fold if you’re interested in how I’m fixing this.

The original drawing code was quite naive and based around everything on the screen being made from a quad. Each wall was a quad and each brick was made up from 6 quads. Each quad was responsible for drawing itself and as a result each had its own Effect object which it used for drawing. This meant there were a lot of Effect objects and each one was being used each frame.

Switching between all these Effect objects led to a large amount of state change on the graphics card and therefore the drop in frame-rate. The primary goal of the refactored render system is to use as few Effect objects as possible to keep graphics state changes to a minimum. This will make it possible to draw many more objects on the screen without hurting the frame-rate much.

Hopefully, I’ll have these changes finished soon and will be able to work on adding some of the planned features.

Although I suspect there are tools out there for doing this already, I decided to have a go at making my own version. It only works with jpg images as the original question was about sorting pictures that came from 2 different cameras and so had different naming systems.

Using it is fairly simple:

1. Hit the browse button and select the folder with the pictures that need sorting.
2. Drag and drop them around in the list. Thumbnails are displayed so you know which image is which.
3. Enter a prefix for the file names in the text box and hit apply.

Download here (394K Windows).

It’s written in C# and uses a DataGridView to show the list of files.

I started a new job a couple of weeks ago, after a few weeks of forced holiday due to my former employer going into liquidation. I have had to hit the ground running in the new job and am learning a lot of new stuff as I come to need it.

Coupled with putting some big efforts into learning Objective-C and iPhone development in my spare time, I haven’t really had time for much else. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find more time as I get back into a schedule with work and home time.

And here is the first image it produced.It just supported direct, diffuse lighting in this first version. The image shows 3 spheres and a plane.

In the next image, there is support for shadows.The scene has changed slightly, but the lighting is still not very good.

Next, I added support for specular highlights and reflections.With highlights and reflections, this is a much better looking image.

Finally, I added transparent materials.The front sphere has a transparency level applied to it and this allows the spheres behind to be seen through it, although with a lot of distortion because of the curved surfaces. At this point some artifacts seemed to creep in, but I’m not sure where from.

It was at this point that I tried adding multithreaded rendering, but found that my initial design couldn’t handle the work being split across threads very well. I have some ideas of how to do a multithreaded version properly based around work queues, but haven’t yet got round to trying it out.

I started working on this earlier this year and it is still work in progress. I’ve been struggling with motivation recently, but hopefully seem to be getting some back now and I plan to have regular updates.

Anyway, here’s an early game play video:

The textures are just place holders and should look much better when I get some decent ones together.

It features a high score table and faster falling blocks as the level gets higher.

The graphics are resolution independent and it is high-res aware so it will look good on any Windows Mobile device with any screen orientation.

I wrote this in the summer of 2008 and it was planned to be used as training material for people moving onto Windows Mobile where I was working at the time.