iTGB 1.2 ETA

#41 @Marc - Correct. It's something Melv developed internally and has provided to myself and the iTorque team for future use. Some testers have reported up to an 80% reduction in memory used by an OS during editing and runtime game play. Now, that was tested on PC and Mac. We still need to run it through the iPhone OS to see what effects are produced.

#42 Sounds great and I'm sure that the iphone version will benefit from it at least that much as level change and alike will speed up drastically as less stuff has to be unloaded at level end and alike, not talking about the speed and especially stability in the actual level.

Thanks for the info :)

#43 Well, it's almost the end of the workweek, still no sign of 1.2 (unless GG is open on weekends also.) To be honest, I'm not sure if choosing iTGB over Unity was such a good idea. In its current state, iTGB 1.1 feels more like iTGB 0.1 (merely TGB with the ability to build to iPhone.)

#44 @Ronald - GG is open on the weekends. I'm one of those employees. I'm looking at either a Friday or Saturday release. I have to focus on the Torque 3D WE Doc release for tomorrow, then cycle back and finish off iTGB 1.2. All that is left is hooking up the final scripts to the complete the build-from-editor process.

Almost end of the week does not mean end of the week.

#45 Edit: beaten by 1 minute by the man himself!

I believe Mich said we would be seeing the release Friday or Saturday, depending on his other time commitments.

While I haven't used Unity, I don't like that you don't get the source - that means if you run into a bug or perhaps a performance optimization you would like to make, you have to wait for the company to fix it. With iTGB you have the option of fixing it yourself.

One suggestion I would like to make is that GarageGames should ship a game using iTGB. Being a licensee of other engines, I can say that I have seen major improvements in engine tech when the engine developer ships a game on the target platform. I suppose that is why iTGE is getting lots of love lately since Marble Blast Mobile will be shipping

We have seen huge performance gains converting script to native...basically going from 1 FPS to 25+ FPS, so if you are having major performance issues and have not converted anything over to C++, you will definitely want to look at making the conversion.

#46 I have to say overall I'm surprised about how much flak iTGB is receiving. I ported Mini Shogi over in under a week. It's "in review" right now for the app store. A super smooth process, imo. I also got the TGB Kart Kit running beautifully on the iPhone in under two weeks. So I guess I haven't run into the struggles that other people have, other than the initial setup.

#47 @Chris: I think a lot of it has to do with the types of games being created as well as people's meaning for what they want their $500 to get them. I thought the process for creating my game was pretty decent given that I only paid a total of $1000 for the stuff; however, $1000 is technically quite a large chunk of cash and the overall qualify/feel of the product is a bit questionable at times. But if the games made with it yields anybody the $$ back, then who gives a crap anyways about the license cost (like in my case). I'd like to see greater quality improvements, though, in the builder.

There definitely are features missing in 1.1 that made me a bit red in the face (like mp3 support and the PVR issue), but those didn't keep me from releasing. I can see those being huge issues for other people, though, amongst other things.

But when one really gets down to things, the offering is a really substantial bargain. It's a matter of putting it all into perspective. I challenge anybody to go ahead and make their own engine and to make it better. Whenever I get ticked off about some bug or feature missing, that's what I remind myself. At the moment, I do have interest in going ahead and making my own engine, but the timing really isn't right; I won't have an entire year or two to blow for quite some time and I doubt most of the peeps on these forums do either.

It's my understanding that Unity is quite appealing to many; it's appealing to me as well, though I haven't used it yet; however, I will be using it soon (about ready to cut the $3000 check) because I need to be smart and make objective judgement for my more long-term strategies.

#48 If iTGB was the only technology then there would be quite little to discuss about its price etc.
Sadly iTGB isn't and thats exactly the problem.

There is unity iphone. which is cheaper in the basic version, yet it shows real love towards rendering and management optimization which makes it capable to run your 3D shooter faster than iTGB handles its simple space shooter.

Then there is Shiva. Shiva itself costs less than TGB Pro, iphone publishing is a free addon. It is not as opted as Unity, but even at worst, it will be much faster than iTGB. It has also the fastest development cycle.


iTorque currently offers neither.
Neither does it show any engineering grade of optimization like Unity nor does it compensate for that with rapid development so we at least could assume that the situation gets better and that there is a strong focus on making the performance situation better.
We actually even know that there is a second technology in development that cuts development time altought the staff does not even seem to be large enough to drive one actively forward on a professional level, making iTGB for the 2D iPhone development what TGB is for PC development.
So it will stay there as simple TGB -> iPhone deployment path which different users seem to be happy with.
I personally am nowhere happy with that, I payed $500 to get an iPhone optimized technology.
If 7 months are not enough for a professional technology and development team to get basic problems solved that anyone who ever read the imagination technology / apple basic optimization guidelines is able to identify, then I definitely don't see the investment as justified (and I upgraded to Unity iPhone Advanced, so its definitely not a matter of absolute price but of quality / $)
The whole thing right now would qualify as a free or low cost deployment addon to TGB Pro at best as that is the quality and degree of iphone oriented implementations iTGB it is offering at the time

#49 Don't be surprised bro, iTGB has gotten a lot of flack because the basic promises made 7 mos. ago fell wayyyy short, simple as that. Sure it's better than nothing, but Cocos 2d is better than nothing too, and that costs 750 dollars less.

If I had a hundred bucks for every post on why their sprites aren't moving from unsuspecting buyers enticed by the thought of iTGB being as efficient as TGB as the product description says, I'll be rich.

So here's hoping that 1.2 will fulfill the 1.0 features; let's stop the surprises.

#50

Quote:
Some testers have reported up to an 80% reduction in memory used by an OS during editing and runtime game play. Now, that was tested on PC and Mac. We still need to run it through the iPhone OS to see what effects are produced.

That's really impressive. I can't help but think that if the PC and Mac get such a huge boost, the iPhone would benefit even more.

#51 80% sounds pretty ridiculous and unrealistic to me. To get that kind of boost, it's always some very special case that only looks good for marketing/sales purposes and doesn't represent reality. 20% would be more realistic and believable. I wasn't born yesterday GG!

#52 @Ray - You can be a cynic if you want, but you can take my sentence word for word:

"Some testers have reported up to an 80% reduction..."

I'm not in marketing or sales. The effect stacked exponentially. The stats did not come from us. They came from other TGB developers we provided the code to.

#53 Sure, I could be another sellout and just make FART app #10,010,001 or some other gimmicky one-trick pony that people forget in about 60 seconds, but I would rather make compelling games that don't further pollute the app store.

#54 @Ronald - I too have stated how the App store has been flooded with crap utilities and buggy games. However, are you reducing the current iTGB games in the App store to the same level as the iFart app?

#55 @ Michael - Not necessarily. Just a comment describing the app store in general. That said, all these 'difficulties' iTGB users are experiencing certainly aren't helping the development process, as I'm sure you'd agree.

Quote:Don't be surprised bro, iTGB has gotten a lot of flack because the basic promises made 7 mos. ago fell wayyyy short, simple as that. Sure it's better than nothing, but Cocos 2d is better than nothing too, and that costs 750 dollars less.

If I had a hundred bucks for every post on why their sprites aren't moving from unsuspecting buyers enticed by the thought of iTGB being as efficient as TGB as the product description says, I'll be rich.

@Ee - Couldn't agree with you more .. . And don't forget Oolong & SIO2, they're also $750 cheaper

#56 Lets wait for 1.2 and see how well it works.

We can still join up to form an iTGB User Taskforce to fix the mess and optimize those things that GG is not willing to optimize / remove to favor non-brain move over of no-requirement TGB games.

We all know what the theoretical capabilities are that iTGB would have due to its roots that are right now buried with awfully inoptimized implementations of the graphics end on the iphone (the CPU end got some nice optimizations with 1.1).
One could say that this is only partially the iTGB teams error, as already the original implementation was awfull, but most modern GPUs (ie anything but Intels CPU to DVI / VGA adapters) were able to compensate for it due to serious overpower. Could because that is no explaination, only an excuse, why this problems have not been adressed when developping iTGB.
iTGB could be so much more than it is right now if it would have taken the chance to fix what is broken with TGB and build upon those things that worked fine.

#57 @Marc - I didn't shell out a wad of cash just to get the chance to fix a buggy program .. . The perfect case scenario would be that GG did a complete re-writing of code with nothing but the iPhone in mind, rather than your typical desktop PC setup with tons of everything (CPU GPU RAM), as opposed to releasing TGB with iPhone build capablities, and then just taking away bits and pieces of code in order to make the thing run faster

#58 Fully agree with you on that, I think my postings the past weeks have shown that inclusive the direct pointers on what is broken right now in the rendering pipeline.

#59 *whistles jeopardy theme*

*looks at watch*

#60 Good thing there was no official announcement. (In other words, there wasn't an official announcement, so no new release.) :)