Special Project: Day 2
Published 9 May 2012 | 
Day 1 of my special project went reasonably well yesterday, but I found that I was spending more time on certain thing than I could afford to. Among those was an issue with the use of PhysicsEditor imports into the Xcode project. When I used the GCpShapeCache helper class to load the plist files that PE creates, I forgot that I also had to change the static C Chipmunk method that runs each tick. That took some scratching of my lightly-haired head, but it dawned on my in the end.
Today has seen some spill over from yesterday’s planned work. The Devil is in the detail as they say, and I needed to make some tweaks to the touch detection to reduce the number of firing requests being sent to the Turret class. Bullets now have a 3 second expiry, which is enough time for the iPhone screen size, but not enough for the iPad unless I scale the graphic assets accordingly. At the moment, I just have the graphics and physics necessary for the retina iPhone display.
This PM, I’m planning to move on to aliens, movement and animation, as well as the collision detection and explosions if everything goes according to plan. I think this calls for a planning session in the garden centre with a big latte and a jacket potato.
Evening Addendum
I made some good progress, but decided to junk Chipmunk for physics. It turned out to be too heavyweight and too much of a performance hog for what I want to do. This is supposed to be a very simple concept after all, so I can make do with some simple bounding box detection instead and that all seemed to work well. I added some nice explosion emitters for the aliens as they die as well as a simple fire effect for when aliens reach the player’s base.
Tomorrow I will be moving on to the display layer showing the score and ammunition details. I will also be adding some movement to the alien ticks as well as some score labels for exploding aliens (providing the label creation and display doesn’t slow things down too much). I may well use Glyph designer to create a bitmap font if it helps with the display speed. Creating some animation frames for the aliens in Opacity will probably take a bit of time, but I’ll keep that reasonably simple as well. Just a few waving appendages. I’m also considering whether to make the eyes track to the player but the characters are so small at the moment, you probably wouldn’t see it and it would be wasted effort.
