Epic Demonstrates Unreal Engine 3 for the iPod Touch/iPhone 3GS | Hacker News Reader

Epic Demonstrates Unreal Engine 3 for the iPod Touch/iPhone 3GS

anandtech.com

23 pointschaostheory14 comments

I need some kind of controller I can mount the iPhone to -- maybe better speakers, a d-pad, a couple buttons, extended battery pack.

I would pay for that (maybe you could even bundle some games with it!).

I would settle for being able to simply use a bluetooth keyboard - that would be sweet - just put on some headphones for audio. I do quite a bit of itouch gaming, and would love to be able to do that.

At that point I'd rather that regular old desktop Mac OS X got an app store of sorts and a bunch of conventions so that awesome games could be quickly developed for computers that already have better speakers, better input devices, and what not. Gaming on OS X sucks and it's a shame Apple seems to focus solely on the iPhone in that regard.

Maybe now they'll finally make a finished Linux port of the engine for all of those Linux-based smartphones.

We can but dream. Icculus was working on an Unreal 3 port to Linux (on the desktop), but appears to be on ice for whatever reason.

Latest news about UT3 on Linux: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzI4N...

There's very few 'Linux-based' smartphones in the common (see linux.org) rather than technical (see kernel.org) sense. Android, while using a Linux kernel, doesn't have glibc or anything else above it. Your engine port would be to the Android NDK or to Dalvik, not to glibc, X, DRI, Mesa, etc.

So I take it the iPhone 3GS has programmable pipe-line graphics hardware? I was just talking with some folken over at gamedev.net about whether or not there were any handheld devices out right now that have shader support. That's really the only big deal here. Graphics engines like Unreal 3 are intended to be very, very efficient. You don't end up with a top-of-the-line 3D rendering engine by being wasteful of processing cycles, and that translates to handheld development universally. The change in rendering paradigm from fixed to programmable pipeline has been the biggest hurdle to getting the latest engines running on "less performant" hardware. After that, it's all content. It makes no sense to use Unreal v1 to push 100,000 triangles when Unreal v3 will push 100,000 triangles a lot faster.

iPhone 3GS has OpenGL ES 2.0 with shader support. OpenGL ES 1.1 was fixed-function and is what is currently on the iPhone/Touch. So when everyone moves to 3rd gen touch or 3GS then shaders will be in effect for the market.

Yeah, that was something that surprised me about the Motorola droid: it's only GLES 1.0, with vague, incomplete support for 1.1. Fixed-function is an unfortunate conceit these days. Programmable pipeline is actually easier to teach to complete noobs.

It is really just a matter of the timing of the hardware. Mobile is about late nineties systems, when it breaks into the opengl es 2 support and 1GHz and 512MB RAM area then we will see the devices jump up to shader support.

Then you will also start to have flash and other software rendered stuff being fast enough. But battery technology needs to advance further as well.

Couple years out except for the cutting edge like the iPhone or the coming Google Phone (HTC) which has Android 2 which also has OGL ES 2. Android will also have the NDK (native) to compete with the native iPhone SDK to speed things up. It is just like coding for old hardware but with better software. So native, graphic tricks, hardware rendering, etc are all relevant again for a moment.

AFAIK android sdk 2 doesn't support opengl es2

Yeh they might not, but they need to. Android NDK 1.6 uses OpenGL 1.1 so you'd think with the iPhone 3GS being OpenGL ES 2.0 that the rumored Google Phone Nexus One would also be that and the next version of android would be as well. Guess we'll have to see. WebGL is based on OpenGL ES 2.o and Windows 7 mobile might even support it.

It is rumored to be so: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/guts-goo...

Yeah, completely agree, supporting the 2.0 standard is essential to remain on par with the iphone and not make android phones look like second class citizens. The wave of "handheld-console level" 3d games on iphone is coming soon, so if not in 2.1, it would be ok even if they slip it in one of the next minor releases. Just one thing bothers me, the introduction of gl2.0 will further segment the market...

Taking bets that the "other mobile platform" is the ZuneHD.

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