John Carmack On RAGE For iOS/Android 105
Andrew Smith writes "John Carmack has an article up on the Bethesda blog discussing the iPhone/iPad version of RAGE, which is said to run at an impressive 60fps. 'Managing over a gig of media made dealing with flash memory IO and process memory management very important, and I did a lot of performance investigations to figure things out. Critically, almost all of the data is static, and can be freely discarded. iOS does not have a swapfile, so if you use too much dynamic memory, the OS gives you a warning or two, then kills your process. The bane of iOS developers is that "too much" is not defined, and in fact varies based on what other apps (Safari, Mail, iPod, etc) that are in memory have done. If you read all your game data into memory, the OS can’t do anything with it, and you are in danger. However, if all of your data is in a read-only memory mapped file, the OS can throw it out at will.' And a tweet by Carmack yesterday suggests that an Android version of RAGE is on the way too."
Re:so... (Score:4, Insightful)
Android applications are written in a Java style runtime. It's not native Linux code.
Android applications can call some native code, but it's a bit like JNI in Java.
One can expect the frame rate of the Android version will be lower than the iOS version for that reason, it's not 100% native code.
Re:Ported? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not out yet. iD and Epic are just having a bit of a pissing match with "Our latest nexest-gen video game engine with gobs of megatextures and pixel-threaded-hyper-polygons will run on *gasp* an iPHONE! So when you're looking to make your next craptastic overpriced piece of shit farmworld-on-an-iWhatever, developers, pick me! Pick ME!" Of course, this is ignoring from the fact that they look like ass and are utilizing the worst control scheme known to man.
I'm half expecting someone to announce next week that they've ported their newest game engine to a freakin' TI-82.
Re:Rage? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't blame him, I would be hesitant of committing to shipping such a demanding, immersive application with the same performance on Android as can be delivered on iOS.
I got modded down the last time I tried mentioning this [slashdot.org], but as someone currently making an income from Android development:
Android audio is a MESS.
Even if it improves anytime soon, not all devices will be getting OS upgrades.
Other unresolved issues I've mentioned [slashdot.org] are why fragmentation is becoming a more and more valid criticism of the platform.
And to any fanboys with modpoints, I'm not a shill, I took a gamble investing my time in learning yet another platform, and I have to deal with these frustrations every day.
Re:60fps on a phone? Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
He's talking about 60 fps because he's proud to have achieved this level of performance on what is widely perceived to be a piece of shit platform for 3D graphics.
It's the same pride that keeps the demoscene alive to this day, spurring coders to cram dazzling animations and music in 4096 bytes of mind-twisting code. That drive to bring out a computer's fullest potential through tireless tweaking, profiling and creative thought.
It is far too easy to be lazy with today's fast PCs and GPUs. There is so much power in these chips that even the sloppiest code can run at acceptable speeds. It takes true dedication and a bit of masochism to buck that trend and push this generous hardware to its limits, and that is what Carmack does best.
If he could make Rage run at 100 fps on the iPhone, he would - he knows full well that it would be impractical, but from an engineering perspective, it would be more efficient, meaning you could take the 100 fps engine and lock it to 60 fps (or even 30), and benefit from lower power consumption or more CPU available for other tasks.
Re:It has to be asked... (Score:3, Insightful)
The quad-core PC, fancy GPU and gigs of RAM allow you to run your PC game at a much higher resolution and graphic quality than any current-gen console. If all you want is 1280x720 with no antialiasing, you can probably get away with a dinky $50 graphics card.
Personally, I like playing flashy games on 3 WQHD monitors with all the sliders maxed out. That's 12 times more dots than a standard HDTV, and a bit more rendering detail due to AA/AF postprocessing, so it's understandable that such ridiculous graphics would require expensive high-end hardware. It's not required to just play the thing if you have more reasonable expectations than I.