Smart Brick HD for iPad is Available in App Store !

Store link:

itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/smart-brick-hd/id375581327?mt=8

Smart Brick Lite is Available in App Store

Smart Brick Lite is LIVE in Apple Store! Have a free trial:

itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/smart-brick-lite/id373771120?mt=8

Smart Brick HD for iPad in Development

Coming soon...

Smar Brick is LIVE on App Store!

Smart Brick is a puzzle game that challenges and trains your 3D space sense, packed with simplistic art style. your need to arrange bricks of different colors with a proper orientation within given time, in order to fill up layers and resolve them. Each level has its unique design not only to entertain, but also to move people emotionally. Intuitive multi-touch control enables manipulation of 3D objects in 3D spaces with ease.

Features:

- Full 3D graphics running smoothly at 40 FPS (on iPhone 3GS)
- Variant level designs with different pace, play styles and goals
- Smooth and intuitive multi touch control
- different sets of bricks, suiting from newbies to experts
- Multiple relaxed casual levels to spend time on, each has a distinct theme
- Full dynamic animation and background
- A highscore board where you can challenge yourself or your friends

How to play:

- Double tap the brick to drop it
- Press on the brick and hold to drag it around
- Tab the spinning rectangles around the brick to turn it in the shown direction
- Try fill up a full layer to make it disappear and score!

Game modes:

- Elimination: you must resolve specific bricks that scattered in the level to win. Some are hard to reach, and time is limited.
- Time Killer: have some time to spend on bus or subway? Relax and score as much as you can in the beatiful levels. No time limit.

Vist: warpdreams.blogspot.com for more screenshots and information about other games.

If you have any suggestions or need support, write to: dreams.warp@gmail.com










Store Link:

Smart Brick Is Submitted for Review

Now I have to wait patiently...

Smart Brick More Screenshot

Smart Brick More Screenshot

3D Tetris - iPhone/iPod touch Game "Smart Brick" Empire State Building G...

Using short value in vertex array instead of float

I've been trying to squeeze more FPS from the rendering part of Smart Brick. I came across an article which suggests using GL_SHORT instead of GL_FLOAT in vertex array to boost performance:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1762866/using-gl-short-instead-of-gl-float-in-an-opengl-es-vertex-array

The solution quite makes sense. Basically you use short value to replace float values; to compensate the precision loss, a pair of additional glScalef and glTranslatef is required per-model.

A reply attached at the end of the post suggests that on iPhone it would be 30% faster. However, this is not the case for Smart Brick; not because the article is wrong, but I think the performance increment depends on actual scenarios. Here is my guess:

If your model contains large amounts of vertices the solution may help a lot. You get big computational savings for using short instead of float, with the price of only one additional glScale and glTranslate calls respectively.

However, it does not help Smart Brick, because Smart Brick renders large amounts of models, each of them contains only few vertices. This way, the savings on float vertices are probably offset by glScale and glTranslate calls, because they are called once per-model, and they are called a lot when there are a lot of models.

Tips to Use Interface Builder As Much As Possible

The Interface Builder of the XCode Suite is particularly powerful. It is very handy when developing for iPhone/iPod touch. However, it comes with some difficulty when you actually want to generate and place your widget programmingly. For example: you have a scroll view with several buttons inside that align vertically, however the number of buttons and the texts on them are decided at run-time so you can't simply drag some in using Interface Builder. But neither do you want to go after all these tedious API calls to create buttons then configure formats manually either; what then?

You can actually design a "sample button" using Interface Builder, have all the formats done (which is nice and easy using IB), then put it at the root of the widget hierarchy. Since it is not a sub-view of any other widgets, it is not shown at run-time. Then you can use the following code to copy this button as you want, place it anywhere you want, without worrying the format:

NSData *archived = [NSKeyedArchiver archivedDataWithRootObject: button_sample];

//Initiate buttons based on a sample

UIButton* b = [NSKeyedUnarchiver unarchiveObjectWithData: archived];

//set text, change position...

...

The Upcoming Game for iPhone

Well... bad news first. The Matrix Phone are not going to be on App Store any sooner. Apparently it is too close to the movie The Matrix thus there is a copyright issue (although I have avoided reference to The Matrix in the application description) . Maybe I would negotiate with Walt Brothers about authorization; but that would be after my next game publishes.

Ok, the next game: Smart Brick. You can think it as a 3D version of Tetris. Instead of filling an 2D plane as in Tetris, the user should fill a 3D volume using bricks that stretches on all three dimensions. It is not a fresh idea actually, there are several versions of 3D Tetris over the web; however, the key is not about the idea, it's about the control. Manipulating bricks in a 3D space, like flipping and movement in three dimensions is far more complicated than in 2D. It will leads to frustration and fun-less-ness. However, thanks to the multi-touch technology of iPhone, "3D Tetris" is made possible. Screenshots and demos will go online soon. Stick closely.

It is also planned to port Smart Brick on iPad - natively, not "stretched" up. But not until I get the product. I need to wait longer because I actually want the 3G version.

For the end of the post, a little tip for the mix C++/Objective C development:

You can have C++ classes as parameters of Objective C functions. However, Objective C does not allow namespace syntax, the "::", in the function declaration. So you need to put a namespace using at the top of your Objective C header. It's kind of nasty, and I still prefer plain C struct as means of communication between C++ and Objective C.

Mix C++ code with Objective C for iPhone

Objective C is not the only language you can use to program for iPhone; you can use C/C++ and mix the C/C++ code with your Objective C code. And I recommend to do so:

Reason 1: for cross-platform purposes. If you use only Objective C then you are locked on the Apple platform. Don't give up the chance of porting your program to other devices such as Zune HD.

Reason 2: for the better C++ standard STL library. IMHO the STL library is much better than Objective C Cocoa libraries; it is portable and easier to use. Especially the container part.

To those who are worried, iphone run-time have full support for C++, including virtual function, exception handling and RTTI. And Xcode does support template.

There is no explicit boundary between C++ and Objective C when you code for iphone. You can write Objective C code in C++ classes/functions, and vice versa. But notice that the source code file other than headers should be named as ".mm".

Althrough you can mix C++ and Objective C, a good idea is to separate them for better portability and maintainability. When comes to a problem that both C++ and Objective C have solutions, I prefer to write the C++ code when possible and only write Objective C code where Cocoa library provides an easier solution, or when only it has the solution. For example, the Cocoa container classes suck but they do provide very easy to use persistance functions; so I use STL container and only translate the content to the Cocoa counter part when I need to save the content to a file.

A trick is that, you can provide Objective C implementation for C++ classes. I would use multiple implementation files for a C++ class interface: keep C++ only impl in one and Objective C impl in another.

The Matrix Phone demo, and technical thoughts

The Matrix Phone is a simple application that simulates the digital rain effect seem in my favorite movie trilogy The Matrix.

The first demo version of The Matrix Phone is complete. Please check out the video attached (I hope this one has a higher resolution than YouTube!).

I will submit this app to the App Store soon... Please wait patiently.


Now... the technical discussion. (Ignore the following if you are not a true geek)
The Matrix Phone supports only iPhone 3GS and third generation iPod Touch since it uses OpenGL 2.0, and OpenGL 2.0 is not backwards compatible. Since the resolution of the video is low, it is hard to see the glow and the interlaced scan line effect that intentionally simulates the old CRT (please see the screenshot); the effect is done through a pixel shader... (maybe it is an over kill, maybe it can also be implemented using blending of the old-school Open GL 1)