What's even cooler, is that all the tools shown in the video are totally free to download, and there's even a fully-functional 30 day trial of the "pro" licenses. You don't even need to know how to build 3D models, as the Unity Asset Store has tons available, both for free and for reasonably cheap licensing fees.

If game development is something you're interested in, but don't really know where to start, give this video a watch. A lot of stuff might initially go over your head, but that's OK, there's no shortage of Unity tutorials online and you really can't go wrong with all the software being free-- The only cost to you is your time, and really, if you're learning something, that's not much of a "cost" at all.

[@infinite_ammo via @rje]

During the WWDC 2010 keynote, we saw Steve Jobs demonstrate the new iPhone's gyroscopic capabilities in a Jenga-like demo app. It was an impressive display of motion-tracking tech that went beyond what we had previously seen from the iPhone. After all, you need a gyroscope to pull off that kind of control, right?

Developer Vishal Srivastava of Subversus Interactive might beg to differ.

As TechCrunch reports, Srivastava, formerly with Microsoft, has created what he calls the "Perspectiverse Engine" that allows the iPhone 3GS and iPad to track motion in a fashion that yields seemingly impossible results from a device lacking actual gyroscope hardware. His system allows the user to manipulate their body in the physical world and see corresponding motion in the virtual world, making the iPhone or iPad feel quite like a window into that world.

According to the developer,

[The engine] uses a combination of device sensors to constantly align the game world with the real world. No matter how you orient your phone, north in the game universe is the same as north in the real world, south is south, up is up, down is down, and so forth. This allows you to interact with that game universe as if you were in it.

And, I can tell you, it works far better than you're probably guessing. If you've got an iPhone 3GS or an iPad, you can give it a try right now with Srivastava's Magic 3D Easter Egg Painter [App Store], a Universal entertainment title that allows you to paint a 3D easter egg by moving around it in virtual space. (And it's on sale for $0.99 through this weekend.) The effect, even in this rather basic application, is pretty amazing.

The developer will soon be releasing a rather more interesting game title called Gyromaniac (previously known as Colonoscapade) in which you move your body around in order to find your way through a human colon and various other internal systems. A demonstration video shows the app in action (and gives one much appreciation for the trials of poor Lemmiwinks).

Srivastava began work on his Perspectiverse Engine long before we knew that the iPhone 4 would sport a gyroscope (it was put together last July, in fact). So, is he daunted by the news that came in the iPhone 4 unveiling? Not at all. The physical gyroscope will improve the accuracy of his engine on new hardware, while on supported devices which lack a gyroscope, the engine will do its thing to simulate one.

And for other developers that like what they see in this system, Srivastava tells us that he is definitely open to the possibility of licensing the technology for use in others' apps, but his first order of business is to build a range of apps on top of the engine that showcase its capabilities on current hardware.

A recent update to Tap Tap Revenge 2 [App Store] (v2.0.1) adds Facebook Connect functionality to the game and iBowl's [App Store] recent (v5.0) update brings the functionality to the SGN title, as well.

The ability to link iPhone games to one of the internet's top social networking websites has the potential to bring the iPhone gaming community together in a whole new way.  Seeing what games your friends' are playing and how they're besting your score on your favorite game--in a place you visit daily anyway--should add a nice element of competition to titles that support the new service.

With eight years of development and hundreds of games under its belt, the Torque Game Engine is the engine that shook up the industry. Large commercial companies like Vivendi love TGE because its quality and feature set rival engines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Successful indie studios like Pocketwatch Games choose TGE because they can make a great game and never pay a dime in royalty fees. Even research institutions like NASA use TGE because they can quickly prototype large-world simulations.

iPhone developers can now utilize Torque's 2D and 3D toolsets for game development.  Torque for iPhone is based on the the company's Torque Game Engine and Torque Game Builder and provides a complete game development platform for the device.

Torque for iPhone allows the creation of iPhone games on a PC and includes a WYSIWYG realtime editor, integration with various 3D modeling packages, a scripting language, and iPhone-specific functionality such as: multi-touch input support, touch screen gesture recognition, iPhone optimized texture compression, and advanced character and shape animations.

As Inside Mac Games reports, GarageGames is very excited to be supporting Apple's new mobile games platform.

"We've already seen enormous interest in the iPhone within the Torque community. Game developers want to make games for the iPhone and this is a natural step since we're already a very good choice for developing OSX games," said Brett Seyler, GarageGames VP of Business Development. "Apple has been great to work with in the past and the very polished iTunes Store as a marketplace for games should encourage developers to continue pushing boundaries on the iPhone without worrying about the usual publishing and distribution difficulties involved in making a successful mobile game."

A sample of titles created with Torque:

• Marble Blast Ultra (XBOX 360)
• Screwjumper! (XBOX 360)
• Protothea (Wii)
• Dreamlords (PC)
• Blockland (PC)

With the launch of the iTunes App Store and the arrival of "iPhone 2.0" just days away, the buzz surrounding the many games that will make their debut when the store goes live is growing louder and louder.  The previews we've seen over the past few months leave no room for doubt that the iPhone is an extremely capable gaming device and that we will see some very solid titles available on launch day.  Given this, we thought it a particularly good time to have a look at just what makes the iPhone thusly capable.

There has been much coverage of the rich Software Development Kit (SDK) Apple has made available, at no cost, to developers.  The Cocoa programming environment with its collection of robust frameworks and APIs--not the least of which is OpenGL ES--gives developers an elegant and powerful way to interact with the iPhone hardware.  Less has been said, however, about the hardware itself.  What gear gives the iPhone its game?

The iPhone's core system-on-a-chip (SoC) hardware is a Samsung S5L8900.  Being a SoC, the device consists of various discrete components that have been integrated into a single device in order to provide a wide range of functionality in a small, low-cost package.  Two components are of particular importance in quantifying such a device's ability to function as a game platform: the processor core and the graphics hardware.

The Samsung chipset at the heart of the iPhone utilizes a 32-bit RISC ARM processing core, the ARM1176JZ(F)-S v1.0.  The ARM device is capable of running at 620MHz, but Apple has downclocked it to 412MHz, presumably in the interest of extending battery life.  (Apple has, at least once in the past, adjusted the clockspeed of both the processor and the system bus via firmware update.)  Unlike the original iPhone, the 3G iPhone and the original iPod touch, the second-generation iPod touch features an ARM1176 v4.0 core running at 532MHz.

Some notable features of the ARM processor in the iPhone:

• High performance integer processor:
  • 8-stage integer pipeline delivers high clock frequency
  • Separate load-store and arithmetic pipelines
  • Branch Prediction and Return Stack
  • Up to 675 Dhrystone 2.1 MIPS in 0.13u process
• High performance memory system
  • Supports 4-64k cache sizes
  • Optional tightly coupled memories with DMA for multi-media applications
  • Quad-ported AMBA 3 AXI bus interface speeds instruction and data access
  • ARMv6 memory system architecture accelerates OS context-switch
• Vector Floating Point coprocessor for powerful acceleration of embedded 3D-graphics

The Samsung SoC also features an implementation of Imagination Technologies' PowerVR MBX Lite 3D accelerator, likely running at the iPhone's bus speed of 103MHz.  This fourth-generation PowerVR chipset is basically an evolution of the second-generation graphics hardware used in the Sega Dreamcast (an amazing console, to those unaware) and which, like its console predecessor, utilizes a unique tile-based rendering system.

Unique patent protected tiling technology enables on-chip processing of hidden surface removal (pixel perfect and submission order independent) and pixel blending, and enables deferred rendering, eliminating all unnecessary access to off-chip memory. The decoupling of geometry and vertex processing from the rasterisation process enables higher throughput while maximizing tolerance to system latencies. Advanced tiling and culling algorithms are implemented in hardware, which i combination with seamless scene complexity management and compression enable support for arbitrarily complex scenes in limited memory footprints with lowest memory bandwidth usage.

The MBX Lite is capable of providing fill rates exceeding 135 million pixels per second and a throughput of 1.7 million triangles per second, depending on configuration.

The MBX Lite in the iPhone is paired with the PowerVR VGP Lite vertex geometry processor which greatly reduces the burden of the main processor by taking on complex 3D vertex calculations.

The POWERVR Vertex Geometry Processor (VGP) is a high-performance, fully programmable floating-point SIMD coprocessor carefully matched to the requirements of 3D. Designed for optimal geometry processing (including transformation and lighting), the VGP offloads these highly compute-intensive tasks from the host CPU resulting in a significant reduction in power consumption. With an instruction set carefully designed to allow common geometry operations to be performed in a minimal number of instructions, the VGP is capable of four floating-point operations per clock.

The processing hardware sitting at the heart of both the iPhone and iPod touch makes them no slouch when it comes to pushing polygons to the screen.  As shown earlier in an iPod Hacks post, the iPhone compares rather favorably to the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS.

• Sony PSP
  • Processor: MIPS CPU @ 222 or 333MHz (selectable)
  • Screen: 480x272 pixels
  • Input: D-pad, analog stick
• Nintendo DS
  • Processor: two ARM CPUs (67MHz and 33MHz)
  • Screen: two 256x192 pixel screens
  • Input: D-pad, touch-screen
• iPhone
  • Processor: ARM CPU @ 412MHz (532MHz in 2G iPod touch)
  • Screen: 480x320 pixels
  • Input: multitouch, accelerometer

The iPhone offers the most screen real estate and arguably the fastest processor of the lot.  But while Apple's device is dramatically more powerful than the DS for both graphics and number crunching, the PSP's graphics engine has substantially more polygon pushing power than the iPhone's MBX Lite + VGP Lite arrangement.  And while outclassed in this area of the PSP's particular strength, we look to the iPhone's unique combination of Wii (accelerometer) and DS (touchscreen) controls along with the unprecedentedly approachable App Store to make it every bit as significant a mobile games platform as Sony's offering, moving forward.

More source information:

• "PowerVR MBX in iPhone," Beyond3D Forum
• "iPhone Processor: What's With This "S5L8900?"," Gearlog
• "Under the Hood: Inside the Apple iPhone," Embedded.com
• "PowerVR," Wikipedia
• "N93 vs N92," 3G Forum
• "OpenGL ES vs. Direct3DMobile," GameDev.Net Forums
• "2nd Generation iPod Touch Faster than iPhone," Touch Arcade
  

[ Post updated on 11/23/2008 to reflect new information that has come to light ]

tag: iPhone specs

Here, we look to the work of an Intel research group in Israel that is striving to develop technologies to allow mobile devices of modest power to run graphically tasking applications such as heavyweight MMORGPs like World of Warcraft and Second Life. 

Second Life and World of Warcraft are among the most prominent MMOGs. They demand lots of computing power – both from the CPU and Graphics. These demands overload any mobile device of today or near future, even including MIDs. By the time the mobile clients have caught up, the performance requirements for MMOGs will grow higher yet.

The 3D Streaming technology developed by Comverse and Intel computes and renders the MMOG content on a powerful backend server, then smartly compresses and streams the graphics onto a client. A network gateway designed by Comverse allows streaming over both WiMAX and 3G cellular networks. With advanced software optimizations including SSE usage, a single Xeon 5400 backend system can serve simultaneously up to 14 clients.

A demonstration video featuring Alexander Sterkin, Sr. SW Application Engineer in Intel’s Software & Solutions Group--but not featuring the iPhone or iPod touch, explains the project further.
 

This is an interesting technology to follow that may enable the iPhone or iPod touch to act as clients to games and applications more demanding than the platform would normally allow.

During the keynote, however, Steve Jobs never gave an exact date for the launch of the iTunes App Store, but did say the iPhone 2.0 Firmware would be released in "early July". The iTunes App Store has always been one of the major features of the 2.0 Firmware, so we should expect the app store launch at that time.

We've been told the App Store is still undergoing active development so Apple may not even know when the final version will be ready.

Also, there's been reports that the latest 2.0 Firmware is "locked down like no phone has ever been." So, Jailbreaking is currently out of the question.

Once the iTunes App Store launches, we suspect the popularity of Jailbreaking will decline, but some apps (such as emulators) will have to remain outside of the official App Store due to restrictions placed by Apple.

Developer Psychochromatic explains: “Looking at the hardware specs, I knew iPhone would be able to play a simple game like Doom no problem as it was open-source and already ran on the click-wheel iPod running Linux. I knew Stepwhite, who I work with on Mac projects, and as he'd just bought himself an iPhone and was working with the unofficial tool-chain I jokingly told him he had one week to port Doom to iPhone, and all it had to do was run; he didn't have to implement controls. One week later, he proudly linked me to his Doom port homepage.”

The first build of Doom saw 15,000 downloads on the project site alone, even without a way to control the game. Once controller input had been included that version received over 25,000 downloads.

Behind the ease of development lies the iPhone’s inherent support for a full scale OS. “The iPhone runs OS X. It's a full UNIX system in your pocket, with brilliant Objective-C frameworks that make coding beautiful and powerful applications a dawdle,” explains Psychochromatic.

Psychocromatic is not the first developer to expound the virtues of the iPhone's rich, versatile, open development environment.  While writing iPhone apps was once a challenge, Apple's release of the free iPhone SDK has made such projects "trivial."

Apple's iTunes App Store launches in June and the list of games that will be available at launch grows daily.  Stay tuned to keep up to date on just what download to expect on launch day.

OpenGL ES (OpenGL for Embedded Systems) is defined and promoted by the Khronos Group, an industry consortium interested in open graphics and multimedia APIs.

OpenGL® ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform API for full-function 2D and 3D graphics on embedded systems - including consoles, phones, appliances and vehicles. It consists of well-defined subsets of desktop OpenGL, creating a flexible and powerful low-level interface between software and graphics acceleration. OpenGL ES includes profiles for floating-point and fixed-point systems and the EGL™ specification for portably binding to native windowing systems. OpenGL ES 1.X is for fixed function hardware and offers acceleration, image quality and performance. OpenGL ES 2.X enables full programmable 3D graphics.

OpenGL ES is the official graphics API of the Symbian OS and Android mobile platforms and is also supported by the Playstation 3.