Going Mobile: Part 2

With the semi-recent discussion about Torque for iPhone making it seem a even more distance iPhone development option than before I am glad that we decided to roll on ahead with our own engine.

Speaking of the BrainFluid Engine there has seen several advancements to its design / code base.

Texture Manager
I added a texture manager to the engine mainly because the BSP Trees required it - but I also hooked it up the to existing systems and the increase in performance as seen through testing tools has been noticeable.

The main idea behind a texture manager is to have it handle all requests for textures - if three different models need the same texture, the texture manager can load that texture once and then bind it to device when it is required. This reduces the memory footprint of the game because instead of storing a texture in three different locations, it is only stored in one central location.

BSP Trees
The engine now uses BSP trees to help optimize rendering and collision detection with level geometry. One of the key decisions we have made regarding the engine is that it has to run fast and take up as little hard drive space as possible. BSP Trees and data compression are helping us on this front.

The BSP Trees we use are calculated in our art pipeline by our level exporter from Milkshape3D and then loaded by the engine when needed. Because we are using BSP Tree collision detection is now fully up and running.

The BFS System
The BFS system (standing for BrainFluid Script) is at the core of the engine. Scripts in BFS are very compact and small taking up far less space then lua or even TorqueScript would. Unfortunately, the compact nature of BFS has came with a price - it is only editable by a custom tool I built called, creatively enough, the BFS Editor.

Thankfully, the BFS system was carefully planned so that it could be robust and accomplish all of our needs for the project. Currently, it supports: functions, if-then statements, scheduling events, global and local variables, and calling BFS functions in Obj-C and vice-versa.

Testing Onward!
Dennis and myself have began testing on the actual device(s) now. I recently bought a iTouch to complement his iPhone so now we can test on both platforms. Once again, we consider this project an investment and are willing to put out the money and effort required to see it through to completion.

Above: A test level running on my iTouch on top of the design document, a very rough work in progress story board, and some programmer concept art. Project details are censored out and artwork is obviously not final.

The first day I got my device was a very disappointing experience - as I discovered that the emulator in the SDK is very broken. Many of functions you can use in your code simply do not work on the actual device. Fortunately I have solved all of those issues now.

Engine Complete
In a short period of time we now have an engine that has its own scripting language, supports 3D levels, models with multiple skins and animations, cameras (1st person, 3rd person, even a rail cam), 2D objects both as sprites and as GUIs, and the performance on the iTouch / iPhone is amazing. We also have a working art pipeline between Maya and our engine for levels and models.

Another great new feature is all of our text is saved in separate files that can be easily translated into another language. Providing quick localization.

Now time to begin making the game!

Like What You See?
You could have the same level of dedication and programming experience on -your- project. All you have do to email me at benv@brainfluidgames.com to discuss the possibility of contracting me for a project or even giving me a job at your company.