I applaude devs going universal. But strong selling point, not really, as you only make those happy who own both, while the others feel like they pay extra for a second device they do not own.
Thank you. I don't think you understand what universal is. Its the ability to download a single app across all devices without any restrictions. Look at Rockstar's GTA3 and Max Payne. Anyway, it's a win win for players with a single device or a multiple devices, it doesn't matter.
I think I do. Would there be freedom to do all versions that would be perfect. Let's say a developer would sell the iPhone version for $1.99, the iPad for $2.99 and just to be nice the universal version for $3.99. That is as long as the developer takes care to optimize each version for the device. Then all those who would never think about getting an iPad ever could profit from still only paying half the price. And much better, there would be no need for them to download iPad Retina assets (which can be rather huge). And universal is not better all the time. To save hassle either the versions are just scaled or the iPad version uses the extra space for useless decoration instead of having the UI optimized for both. Not a big deal if you have a huge name, take lke $9.99 anyway and UI compared to licence is jsut a very small part of development. For our travel apps I wish we never went universal. If we put all the stuff in for retina resolution the app goes up to 200-300MB , which the iPhone users load too. Or we do our own downloading routine that puts some 100-200MB trafiic on our server for every iPad 3 user. There would be an easy solution, like adding universal support as InApp purchase with the additional assets being on Apple's servers.
Yesterday, we've managed to keep hard shadows from not blowing away the 3GS devices. It will be hard to do full scene shadows on the iPad1 (which is the most difficult one to optimize due to the large screen size). What I'm probably going to do is render the screen at 70% and upscale, that will really improve rendering speed. Then I'll see how performance goes like that, if good, I'll will leave hard shadows on the iPad1 enabled by default. I've also put two guys optimizing scenes assets. We will end up having two versions of the most heavy-critical assets. There's some other stuff that low-end devices may be missing by default, which are motion blur, refraction, reflections, to name a few. By default, the game will detect your device and automatically choose the correct asset for you, but you can still switch quality as you wish. From there, I'm not responsible for slowdowns or crashes.
@kukulcan, Having an universal app is always a winner situation for the end-user. Let's say you bough the game for your 3GS device, a month later you upgrade your device to a new powerful one, you will enjoy the same game with better quality for free. The downside of all this is that the game size will increase, but even the high-end version by itself is already big, so who cares? ^^ PS: And no, we are not going to sell the game at ridiculous prices, it will be truly justified.
The only downside to a universal app is storage space. That said, this is why I have always bought the biggest iPhones and iPads available to me. If you need more space, save longer next time, buy bigger.
I may be new, but I'm experienced. Don't rub me off as if I was some newbie, because I'm extremely familiar with this kind of stuff. iOS games are hardly of the quality that the games I play on my PC are, especially with hardware constraints. I believe that if I played this on my PC, I'd feel like I was playing some super-basic freeware title. I wasn't comparing, I was noting that it's unlikely this game could live up to the standards of most of my games, i.e., Bioshock, Alan Wake, or Starcraft II. They are totally different, but they still feel like they were made for the PC, not a platform with a touchscreen, and virtual buttons. I am happy. In fact, I'm extremely happy that you've taken this dive to appease the 4th Gen device owners. It's incredibly noble of you, and I applaud you for doing so. It's why I will be buying your game for my iPod. Just... Not on any other platforms. I already knew that. It's a part of my job and my hobby. And to you. And I apologize for pointing out your typos, as well. Spelling errors drive me insane, but that isn't an excuse for correcting you.
New pictures guys! This is an other character that you will interact with in the game, It's a nurse. Well a sexy nurse! ^^ Still being worked on, but you'll get an overall idea of the final result. I'll post more pictures once fully done. More stuff coming soon. Enjoy!
It's probably hard to see on my previous images but all our characters are carefully highly detailed and sculpted the same way to extract details, normal, specular, AO and all other fancy maps that's makes them shine in the game.
Just found this thread and I must say that I'm excited. Is there a release date? I LOVE psych horror! Will the iPad 2 and 3 have identical effects and textures or will the 3 get some more AA and higher poly models? Just curious.
The game is due by the end of the year. The iPad2 and 3 will have Higher texture (and effects) resolutions. Anti-Aliasing, dynamic soft shadowmapping, multiple pixel lights and all post effects. The 3GS/4/iPad1 will have less post-effects, only one pixel light (the rest will be vertex), hard shadowmapping with lower resolution, models a bit less detailed and fewer particles effects. The high-end version will have directional lightmapping (similar to the Source engine) with normal and specular mapping. Both versions will feature fog and dust effects but of course the low-end version will have a less detailed hardware-hungry version.
*sigh* but we've already waited so long. Little surprised that the new iPad doesn't get SOME kind of graphical boost. Higher resolution, maybe? Little puzzling because it's obviously more powerful with double ram and beefier gpu. Maybe some motion blur, depth of field, extra lighting effects? Oh well, I definitely look forward to it. Thanks for answering my previous question so quickly!
They have of course a higher resolution. When i say post-effects i mean: DOF, motion blur, color correction, edge blending (for the water shader) full screen shadowmapping soft filter. You won't see such effects on the low-end versions. Yes, as mentioned earlier, high end version will feature a lot of more graphic/visuals, including multiple pixel lights and higher texture resolutions. Cheers,
Holy crap?!? Those kind of effects combined with high res and those very nice textures from the gameplay vid will KILL the game on any idevice! Sure it looks beautiful, wow does it ever, but I seriously doubt it'll run at anywhere above 15 fps. Are you running it on a desktop emulator or an actual device? That said, I will definitely stay up the Wednesday night this releases...wow I'm still in a state of shock that so much time and love was put into an iOS game. Been reading through the thread and it just seems to good to be true... though those "nude scenes" will give you a lot of trouble with apple...
High end mobile devices are pretty capable of almost current gen graphics (less detailed of course). Still require lots of trickery and optimizations everywhere. Pixel/poly budgets still to be carefully managed. As for the nude characters, don't worry, It have been already censored for the iOS version.
I know this is a little off topic, but I'm curious and want an answer from a developer, not apple: how much more advantageous to gaming, if at all, is the new iPad's 1gb RAM and gpu? It seems as though it's just getting the ipad2 effects, so I'm really starting to wonder of it was all it was hyped to be power-wise. I know it has that retina display to push, but maybe there could be an in-between of 1048x768 and 2048x1536 for games? As for FM, do you mind if I give you some feedback and constructive criticism on what I've seen and heard (went thru the entire thread)? -do you plan in having physics for enemies and environmental objects? Everything would seem so much more lifelike if enemies and apparitions slumped to the ground in a lifelike manner instead of falling in a scripted animation. Plus the game's world would seem that much more real. -give us fully customizable controls with multiple schemes. Let us resize buttons and where gestures will appear. Let us customize the controls to our own play style! Controls can make or break an iOS game; please make sure you get these right (would be happy to beta test!) -this is more a matter of personal preference, but I feel the game should have more gore. Not over the top, but splattering on walls, floor, and other monsters/people would be a nice touch. Limbs that could be shot off, as in dead space, would be a nice addition, too. -it seems as though you want a hardcore horror game designed to scare the living day lights out of the player. Great! Now do it. Give us some random, non scripted events. Let mirrors reflect *insert scary something* every once in a while. Make us scared to walk another step. It's not only about survival and ammo conservation, but also about the scares. Have jump scenes, shockingly, times where the camera won't allow you to see around the corner, and hallucinations. Anything to put the player on edge. It looks as though you're doing that now, just wanted to make sure you knew that we love that. -yes, if it adds to the story and isn't just eye candy, have the nudity. I honestly don't see how that's totally required, though. But please, please, please, don't get into a scrap with apple. They're very stingy as we all know, and the last thing we want is more delays. -speaking of story, it sounds as though this game is very story based. I like that in horror. But please make sure the story is well written and presented by the actors. The last thing we want in a horror game are cheesy lines delivered by high schoolers that make us chuckle. I know all of the above is a tough request, and I really don't expect all or even some of it. But if you want the game to be fully polished, those are some of my suggestions. That said, I think the game is shaping up to be AMAZING and I can't wait!! thank you for all of your hard work to bring such a game to the iOS platform -
Technically yes, it's powerful, 4 gpus instead of 2 (iPad2), but on practice it depends on lot's of factors. For example, running a game at retina resolution is simply stupid, other than having very sharp edges, it will be slower than running the same application at half resolution (1024*768) on the iPad2. However, if you run your application at half resolution (1024*768) on your iPad 3, you will see a huge performance benefit (which is what everyone is doing right now) and then use that extra power elsewhere. But even so, there's other factors that contribute to rendering speed (not just resolution), camera clipping planes distance, depth buffer precision, drawcalls, textures resolutions, poly budgets, dynamic pixel lighting, shader complexity and the list goes on really deep. ^^ Let me also point that what you've seen so far is probably nothing at all about the game, only small scratches on the surface. But yeah we take very serious user feedback (no matter how good or bad they are). We have developed a very complex spawn system, enemies can make other enemies spawn, they can come out of anywhere (floor, ceiling, windows, walls, etc). They can attack in group, patrol, wander, alert nearby enemies and no necessary take the shortest path to the player, they can also hide them self. You'll see it in action went the alpha is out. Our interfaces/controls are easy to pickup, intuitive and fully customizable internally. Though the interface where the player can do those changes still need to be build (should be ready for the final beta though). Can't comment too much about this as it reveals a bit too much about the internal design of the game but we agreed that shocking events/scenes are really necessary in a horror game. Every single little event in FM is build around the idea of fear. That's why it's a psychological survival horror. We've implemented a system which we called it "FOG" for "Fear Oriented Gameplay" where everything is meant to put stress, feel out of control, make the player feel helpless, shock him, scare him, make him jump. We are very careful with this and is provably the feature that we take most seriously! There's some shocking and twisted scenes for you to see. Is nothing about porn (or related to) but more about the beauty and poetry of fear through various incarnations/representations. Can't give any details about this, you must wait. The final version of the game will be triple-checked by a localization studio specialized on that! Don't worry about it. As for the voice actors, they are professionals working in the game industry, with several years of voice-acting experience. Again, don't worry, we wont be putting our ugly voices and weird accents on the game. What we do is design, make art and code the game. Hopefully the game will live to your standards and loved by everyone. We are working hard to make FM a very nice survival horror game. If you missed it, check out a interview with SlideToPlay about FM: http://www.slidetoplay.com/story/slide-to-play-q-and-a-forgotten-memories You will find a bit more info about the game (probably not discussed in this post). Again, tanks to your for your kind comments. I appreciate when users care about our hard work and take their time to give such nice comments. You are our true source of inspiration, our fuel and motivation! King regards from Psychoz Team!
