iPad Development Changes/Tips

Hey everyone. We are going to use this thread to post bugs, fixes, tips, and other notes related to iPad development with iT2D. We are looking to put out an official release this week, so anything useful in here will be rolled in.

1: Conversion - Your existing iT2D projects are built for the iPhone. To convert the project, perform the following:

1. Open your game's Xcode project
2. Right click on your target
3. Upgrade current target to iPad
4. Depending on your preference for multiple target, choose universal or separate targets. I've been using Universal.

2: Hard-coded resolutions -The overall problem is that the original developers operated under the assumption that the iPhone engine was always going to be targeting two possible resolutions: 480x320 and 320x480. Now that the iPad is available, it doesn't make sense to make a completely separate product/engine and fall into the same hole (what happens when the iTV comes out and we want iTorque to support it? =p)

What we are going to do is create a few extra variables and settings to make easy for the end-user (you) to determine the target platform and resolution. I would like for this to be accessible from script and the editor, as well as source code. This is not a monumental task, but it does need to be clean. Simple hacks will work on a per game basis, but when you want to create universal apps you will want something efficient and easy to use.

These are easy to track down, though. In Xcode, perform a search in the project for "480". You will get a list of code lines where this value is hardcoded. While we are working on a more elegant solution, you can change the following lines of code to get iPad resolution support (1024x768).


In platformiPhone/platformGL.h, lines 52 and 53

#define IPHONE_MAX_RESOLUTION_X			480
#define IPHONE_MAX_RESOLUTION_Y			480

Change to

#define IPHONE_MAX_RESOLUTION_X			1150
#define IPHONE_MAX_RESOLUTION_Y			1150

You will want to change these values to fit the new max resolution. For some reason, the obvious 1024 appears to have a bug. An offset has to be applied to the value for the canvas to line up. This will go away entirely in the final release

In platformiPhone/iPhoneOGLVideo.mm, lines 74, 75, 77, and 78

//------------------------------------------------------------------------------
void OpenGLDevice::initDevice()
{
// instead of caling enum monitors and enumdisplaymodes on that, we're just going to put in the ones that we know we have

	mResolutionList.push_back( Resolution( 320, 480, 16 ) );	
	mResolutionList.push_back( Resolution( 480, 320, 16 ) );	

	mResolutionList.push_back( Resolution( 320, 480, 32 ) );	
	mResolutionList.push_back( Resolution( 480, 320, 32 ) );	

}

Change to

//------------------------------------------------------------------------------
void OpenGLDevice::initDevice()
{
	//instead of caling enum monitors and enumdisplaymodes on that, we're just going to put in the ones that we know we have

	mResolutionList.push_back( Resolution( 320, 480, 16 ) );	
	mResolutionList.push_back( Resolution( 480, 320, 16 ) );	

	mResolutionList.push_back( Resolution( 320, 480, 32 ) );	
	mResolutionList.push_back( Resolution( 480, 320, 32 ) );	

	mResolutionList.push_back( Resolution( 768, 1024, 16 ) );	
	mResolutionList.push_back( Resolution( 1024, 768, 16 ) );	

	mResolutionList.push_back( Resolution( 768, 1024, 32 ) );	
	mResolutionList.push_back( Resolution( 1024, 768, 32 ) );

}

In your game's common/commonConfig.xml, change

<Resolution>480 320 32</Resolution>

To

<Resolution>1024 768 32</Resolution>

Of course, that depends on whether your game launches in landscape (1024x768) or portrait (768x1024) mode. Finally, make sure that while you are in the editor you set your Design Resolution to 1024x768 or 768x1024. This way you can test the game on the dev machine before deploying to device.

This should get you going on at least having your app render to the iPad device and simulator properly. I already have a list of some additional fixes, such as GUIs, input, and optional render specs to work on. Feel free to post any issues you run into. We will continue to work on this for an official release.

I will post more as I come across them, so you can get a headstart without waiting on a packaged build (hurray for source code access!). We are looking at two releases in the near future:

1. iT2D 1.3.2 - Fixes/changes related to iPad support
2. iT2D 1.4 - New iPhone OS feature support, new demos, new docs, new sample code