traylorpark
Very Active Member
- Joined
- Sep 30, 2008
- Messages
- 593
Well, let me tell you the main conundrum we are facing currently. Currently, Paper Wars can be built for Wiz, Caanoo, Open Pandora and iOS devices. Crow's engine is incredibly versatile like that and can go anywhere pretty much 
The main annoyance with the Caanoo/Wiz is that it's hardware is very limiting. The largest texture you can feed it is 256x256 (that I know). All of Paper War's shadows and stuff are pre-calculated into the texture, so the lower the texture resolution, the worse the whole world looks. When I create the textures, I start at 2k (2048x2048). On iOS, I bring them down to 1024x1024. A single map is made up of about 4 or 5 of those huge textures. To put this in perspective, all 4 of the Caanoo's textures can fit into 1 iOS texture.
Secondly, the Caanoo/Wiz pollux 3D engine doesn't handle z-depth very well (at least not that we have seen). What this means is that polygon planes that are almost parallel and and very close to each other, can flicker through each other.
This was a huuuge problem during the first release for the Riot Tag Team compy. Because of the paper style, there were lots of overlapping planes that flickered through each other. It was horribly distracting. I spent a week going back into the geometry and cutting out polys and shuffling stuff around in order to minimize the flicker. It was a massive time sync, and slightly more advanced 3D processors don't suffer with that problem anymore. I could have spent that time on more animations or sound effects!
The Pandora with it's OpenGLes 2.0 SGX shouldn't have this problem, (it's essentially the same as an iPhone) but if it does, it's the fault of poor drivers.
So, after all that ... yeah, I love the Caanoo, I own 2! I think it has a lot of neat possibilities. I think the Caanoo has survived in spite of GPH who (from our perspective) is doing it's darndest to not support the machine. But there are so many optimizations that have to be done in order to make something 3D perform well on this little machine. And there is nothing wrong with that, it's a great challenge and makes you a better developer! But I don't want to be a hobbyist anymore. I want to do this for real.
I think we will continue to put out new builds for Caanoo. We love this community, you guys are the greatest! We just won't be taking as much time optimizing it for the Caanoo (like cutting out the flicker) as we did before.
The main annoyance with the Caanoo/Wiz is that it's hardware is very limiting. The largest texture you can feed it is 256x256 (that I know). All of Paper War's shadows and stuff are pre-calculated into the texture, so the lower the texture resolution, the worse the whole world looks. When I create the textures, I start at 2k (2048x2048). On iOS, I bring them down to 1024x1024. A single map is made up of about 4 or 5 of those huge textures. To put this in perspective, all 4 of the Caanoo's textures can fit into 1 iOS texture.
Secondly, the Caanoo/Wiz pollux 3D engine doesn't handle z-depth very well (at least not that we have seen). What this means is that polygon planes that are almost parallel and and very close to each other, can flicker through each other.
This was a huuuge problem during the first release for the Riot Tag Team compy. Because of the paper style, there were lots of overlapping planes that flickered through each other. It was horribly distracting. I spent a week going back into the geometry and cutting out polys and shuffling stuff around in order to minimize the flicker. It was a massive time sync, and slightly more advanced 3D processors don't suffer with that problem anymore. I could have spent that time on more animations or sound effects!
The Pandora with it's OpenGLes 2.0 SGX shouldn't have this problem, (it's essentially the same as an iPhone) but if it does, it's the fault of poor drivers.
So, after all that ... yeah, I love the Caanoo, I own 2! I think it has a lot of neat possibilities. I think the Caanoo has survived in spite of GPH who (from our perspective) is doing it's darndest to not support the machine. But there are so many optimizations that have to be done in order to make something 3D perform well on this little machine. And there is nothing wrong with that, it's a great challenge and makes you a better developer! But I don't want to be a hobbyist anymore. I want to do this for real.
I think we will continue to put out new builds for Caanoo. We love this community, you guys are the greatest! We just won't be taking as much time optimizing it for the Caanoo (like cutting out the flicker) as we did before.
