Promit's Ventspace

Game Debugging And Tweaking Via MIDI Controller

Today, we’re going to talk about how to configure a MIDI controller to act as a debugging aid for a game - or any software development project.

Why a MIDI controller?

[caption id=”attachment_1186” align=”alignnone” width=”600”] Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0[/caption]

Sony A77 Mark II: EVF Lag and Blackout Test

I’m planning to review this camera properly at some point, but for the time being, I wanted to do a simple test of what the parameters of EVF lag and blackout are.

Time Capsule Draft: "Speculating About Xbox Next"

I was digging through my Ventspace post drafts, and I found this writeup that I apparently decided not to post. It was written in March of 2012, a full year and a half before the Xbox One arrived in the market. In retrospect, I’m apparently awesome. On the one hand, I wish I’d posted this up at the time, because it’s eerily accurate. On the other hand, the guesses are actually accurate enough that this might have looked to Microsoft like a leak, rather than speculation. Oh well. Here it is for your amusement. I haven’t touched a thing about it.

Quick tip: Retina mode in iOS OpenGL rendering is not all-or-nothing

Some of you are probably working on Retina support and performance for your OpenGL based game for iOS devices. If you’re like us, you’re probably finding that a few of the devices (cough iPad 3) don’t quiiite have the GPU horsepower to drive your fancy graphics at retina resolutions. So now you’re stuck with 1x and 4x MSAA, which performs decently well but frankly looks kind of bad. It’s a drastic step down in visual fidelity, especially with all the alpha blend stuff that doesn’t antialias. (Text!) Well it turns out you don’t have to choose such a drastic step. Here’s the typical enable-retina code you’ll find on StackOverflow or whatever: if([[UIScreen mainScreen] respondsToSelector:@selector(scale)] && [[UIScreen mainScreen] scale] == 2) { self.contentScaleFactor = 2.0; eaglLayer.contentsScale = 2.0; } //some GL setup stuff ...

I Am Dolphin - Kinect Prototype

I’d hoped to write up a nice post for this, but unfortunately I haven’t had much time lately. Releasing a game, it turns out, is not at all relaxing. Work doesn’t end when you hit that submit button to Apple.