...to the iPad.
The past couple of months I've been working on porting the game over, thinking it wouldn't actually take the past couple of months ( So much for a nice quick port ).
Let's kick off with a clip of the game, it's easier to talk around that
( I have no idea if that'll embed properly, it'll be kinda cool if does ) < edit, nope >
In terms of content there's not a ton of new stuff in there ( Meant to be a quick port to test the waters and all that ), but the game itself has improved so much.
Looking at the original, the title screen is such a fucking mess where I had to shoe horn a load of extra things in there at the last minute, so this time it's been planned a lot better. Also because the game was a flop ( It was one of the first Stage3D games, and at that time you couldn't give them away to portals, I don't know if that's changed since ) I ended up just experimenting with it, like the fullscreen mode etc. which didn't do it any favours presentation wise.
Originally we used ND2D over Away3D for the display, for the port I've moved over to Starling, which performs much better. Added in to that I've done a ton of optimisations ( Linked lists, stupidly fast but a massive pain in the arse to actually work with ) and now it's running 1024x768 @60fps, on an iPad3.
Not much has had to be cut, we've dropped one planet from the background and the asteroids are gone. It seems fillrate is the main bottle neck on the mobile GPU, so the asteroids flying in and out of the screen just killed the framerate, and as framerate is king in a game like this visual love has to take a back seat.
So we're using AIR for this, and hell, that's impressive. That it runs the same on my iPad as it does on the desktop is just mental impressive. I can really recommend giving AIR a try if you haven't already, it's a thing of beauty.
One common complaint we got about DN8 Pulse was the music. I've gone back to what we did with the original and just sourced all the music from looperman.com and this time we've got 22 bass tracks, 23 drum loops plus 10 lead tracks, so the sound is much more random ( We also trigger different voices at different times, so for example some levels will just start with the drum beat then the bass will kick in ).
It's much closer to the Rez type thing I always wanted for the music. The only downside is that Flash seems to struggle with anything more than around 5 voices at once when aiming for 60fps ( That's even on the desktop ), which has limited me slightly.
And I think that's almost it for now. If anyone has any code related questions, or any questions at all, please feel free to ask them. We're looking at the game soft launching the end of next week, and I've still got a scary amount to do, so I better finish now and get back to it.
Thanks for reading.