wraggster
August 22nd, 2008, 15:24
From Zod himself
Being that you're at ZodTTD.com, I figure you may be interested in some of the day to day events that I go through as ZodTTD. So in the first of a daily series of blog posts, here I go...
Most the emulators and games I program and port on the iPhone & iPod Touch use Apple's CoreSurface framework. Many wonder why I don't use Apple's OpenGL ES framework.
OpenGL ES v1.1 works well with blitting many pre rendered surfaces. Sadly though, it can't easily blit a chunk of memory with pixel data in it. It just so happens most emulators and some games use software rasterizers to render each frame of a game to memory. OpenGL ES v1.1 just doesn't provide this functionality.
So when I get all excited over AppStore and the official SDK, what does Apple decide to remove? Well they remove CoreSurface. So now if I decide to put some ZodTTD software on AppStore, I must use UIKit (which is slower than CoreSurface) or OpenGL ES which runs miserably slow for what I do. We're talking 15 FPS with OpenGL ES where CoreSurface gets 60+.
It gets a bit worse when you think of how Apple is treating CoreSurface ever since firmware 2.0.0. It's considered a "Private Framework" and seems to have some bugs in it, as if its not important to check if it has bugs anymore.
Why did Apple remove CoreSurface from allowed frameworks for AppStore? How long can we enjoy this framework before its left in an unsable condition by Apple?
If only I knew.
http://www.zodttd.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3130
Being that you're at ZodTTD.com, I figure you may be interested in some of the day to day events that I go through as ZodTTD. So in the first of a daily series of blog posts, here I go...
Most the emulators and games I program and port on the iPhone & iPod Touch use Apple's CoreSurface framework. Many wonder why I don't use Apple's OpenGL ES framework.
OpenGL ES v1.1 works well with blitting many pre rendered surfaces. Sadly though, it can't easily blit a chunk of memory with pixel data in it. It just so happens most emulators and some games use software rasterizers to render each frame of a game to memory. OpenGL ES v1.1 just doesn't provide this functionality.
So when I get all excited over AppStore and the official SDK, what does Apple decide to remove? Well they remove CoreSurface. So now if I decide to put some ZodTTD software on AppStore, I must use UIKit (which is slower than CoreSurface) or OpenGL ES which runs miserably slow for what I do. We're talking 15 FPS with OpenGL ES where CoreSurface gets 60+.
It gets a bit worse when you think of how Apple is treating CoreSurface ever since firmware 2.0.0. It's considered a "Private Framework" and seems to have some bugs in it, as if its not important to check if it has bugs anymore.
Why did Apple remove CoreSurface from allowed frameworks for AppStore? How long can we enjoy this framework before its left in an unsable condition by Apple?
If only I knew.
http://www.zodttd.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3130