Noel

Independent game designer and programmer. Created Subterfuge, Casey's Contraptions, Flower Garden. Runner. Cyclist. Nature enthusiast. Magic addict. @noel_llopis.

Two Day iPhone OpenGL Class Coming to The Bay Area

carsAfter the success of the OpenGL class in Denver, we’re bringing the iPhone OpenGL class to the Bay Area. It will be held November 19th and 20th in Cupertino, right next to Apple’s headquarters at Infinite Loop.

The class is aimed at iPhone developers without previous OpenGL or 3D graphics experience. As part of the class, we’ll create both 2D and 3D OpenGL applications, and we’ll cover a broad range of topics, start with the basics of setting up OpenGL and rendering triangles on screen, to multitexturing and point sprites in the last day. This is definitely a hands-on class, so you’ll need to bring your laptop and be ready to do some coding.

Check out the Mobile Orchard page for discounts and registration details. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Hope to see you there!

Space in Stereo iPhone Game Jam Postmortem

A week ago, I sent out a quick tweet asking if anyone would be interested in doing an iPhone Game Jam at the 360iDev conference. The response was immediate and hugely positive, so, with the help of the organizers of 360iDev, we put together an informal iPhone Game Jam.

The idea was to get together Tuesday evening, starting at around 7PM, and to code all night and have an iPhone game (or at least a prototype) done by morning. About 25 showed up, working on about a dozen projects. Participants were welcome to group into teams or work solo. There were no restrictions as far as themes or technology. The only rules were that you had to finish something by morning (no leaving something that was 5% of a game) and you had to start the game from scratch (no finishing a game you had started a while ago).

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360iDev: Cranking Up Floating Point Performance To 11

360iDev_speakerHere are the slides and the source code for my talk this afternoon at 360iDev in Denver. Thanks to everyone who came to the talk. I was surprised to see so much interest on this topic, so that was great.

Session description:

The iPhone has a very powerful engine under that shiny hood when it comes to floating-point computations. This is something that surprises a lot of programmers because by default, things can slow down a lot whenever any floating point numbers are involved. This session will explain the secrets to unlocking maximum performance for floating point calculations, from the mysteries of Thumb mode, to harnessing the full power of the forgotten vector floating point unit. Stay away from this session if he thought of reading or even (gasp!) writing assembly code scares you.

GDC Austin 2009: Squeezing Every Drop Of Performance Out Of The iPhone

austinI just put up the slides for my talk this morning at GDC Austin: Squeezing Every Drop Of Performance Out Of The iPhone.

Thanks for everyone who attended the session and for the great feedback so far. If you’re going to be in China next month, I’ll be giving a very similar talk at GDC China.

Session description:

This session will describe the iPhone performance optimization lessons learned through many hours of tuning. We’ll start with an overview of the performance analysis tools available on the iPhone SDK to help you narrow down your performance bottlenecks. Then we’ll cover the best way to set up your render loops, rendering best practices, how to deal with the limited memory, or even how to drop down to assembly to use the forgotten vector floating point unit.

Presentation slides (pdf format)