Level size

#1 My biggest recommendation is you start right now with an iPhone or iPod Touch and a Mac/xCode, otherwise you will be in for some serious re-writes when you get around to deploying to the device.

Also, I wouldn't bother attempting to support iPhone 3G.

#2 Scott: Oh, no point in supporting 3G? Had no idea, that's a weight off my mind, thanks! Unfortunately it'll take another month or two until i can get my hands on an ipod touch, that's why i was looking for a ballpark estimate on the mapsizes that itorque could run comfortably, maybe based off people's personal experiences.

Thanks for the help!

#3 Boris, you can always start working with the simulator in xCode? That should give some ideas of the supported map sizes. Sorry I can't be more help but I haven't used tile maps in any of my games so far. I believe the biggest image you can load is 2048x2048 but generally I would stick with 1024x1024.

#4 I agree with Scott. If your game can't already run well on the iphone 3g you can drop support for it and it probably won't affect sales too much. Here's are my download stats for Are You Quick Enough broken down to devices from yesterday.

iPhone 4 9078 42%
iPod Touch 4G 4763 22%
iPhone 3GS 3436 16%
iPod Touch 2G 2299 11%
iPod Touch 3G 628 3%
iPad 2 513 2%
iPhone 3G 486 2%
iPad 346 2

The numbers are high because I ran a free campaign over the weekend but that's another story.

As you can see iphone 3g makes up only 2% of all my users yesterday, but combine with ipod 2g it makes up 14%. So it's up to you if it's worth your time to make it compatible.

#5 Thanks Johnny, some interesting numbers there. For Cannibal Cookout we are supporting iPod Touch 2G but not the iPhone 3G, although get it to run decently on the 2G is proving to be a challenge :(

#6 @Boris - Scott and Johnny are correct. You'll need to test on the devices from the start to get an accurate measurement of performance. Now, looking at your numbers, that is a pretty large set of tiles. I have a feeling you will run into some slowdowns, but I can't say for sure since I have never tested that many tiles on a device. The rendering may not be so bad, but any interaction you might have will be very CPU intensive and might jitter.

#7 Johnny: Thanks a lot for the insight! I have no doubt that by the time i manage to publish my game (at least 4 months from now) iphone 5 will be released, iphone 4 prices will drop, and even fewer people will be using a 3g devices. I'm surprised that ipads rank so low, though, but grats on the impressive numbers (despite the free weekend)

Scott: But is the simulator reliable as far as emulating performance conditions on a device? I'll try to get my hands on a mac computer this week and tinker around with it!

Mich: damn, i was hoping that since it's just 16 pixel tiles at a quarter of the resolution, and not hd artwork, i might be able to afford bigger levels; i guess i'll have to optimize somehow. Thanks!

#8 @Boris, from memory the simulator accurately reflects the memory level of the device, not sure if the CPU is realistic though.

#9 Thanks Scott! I've yet to get my hands on a device or an apple computer, so i'm still forced to run blind; my tilemap images, even the ones with hundreds of different tile drawings, range up to 100kb in size, because i'm working reasonably optimized: 256 color indexed png's that don't go past 300x300 pixels in size; I'm asking because i see people making full-resolution games with these massive backgrounds, so i'm thinking my stuff should be a cakewalk by comparison, but i know nothing about how itorque deals with multiple tilemaps overlayed on top of eachother. Thanks for the help anyway!

#10 @Johnny Vo (or anyone else that knows), how did you get those stats on your app downloads (as per post #4 above)? I cant find anything like that in iTunesConnect and when i asked apple they said there was no feature..
Cheers, Craig

#11 There is no such thing as indexed pngs on 3d hardware anymore Boris.

It is at very least 16bit, at max 32bit per pixel unless its PVRTC in which case its 2bits per pixel or 4 bits per pixel.

Massive backgrounds can be handled through various ways, from not having them as static images at all (vector art that gets baked at runtime) over having it through tiled, opaque combinations on a flat bg color vs simply having a single big image there which when opaque is no deal breaker either

#12 @Craig - Those numbers are from localytics. Its an awesome free SDK for telemetry. It also has information like what devices download your app.

#13 @Johnny - Thanks, looks like a good tool, i will have to integrate it with my app for the next update. As you've been using it for a while already, any chance you could post some recent device model and iOS version stats? Im curious about whats more commonly in use at the moment.