1) Menus - There is now a starting menu with the logo I showed off in the previous post. It also has a "Play" button and a button for instructions. Clicking the play button starts the game and the instructions button shows a page with rules of the game (a tap on the screen returns to the menu).
2) Pause - based on the same "sio2 widget" technology, there is now a pause feature. During the game, if you flip the ipad to face downwards (or accelerate it downwards at 2g) it will go into pause mode - the clock will stop, but there is a graphic covering up the game board. A single tap resumes.
3) Game over - when the player runs out of time, the selector disappears, all the doors open, and the chips start to fall towards the center. They make a tiny ball, which then explodes outwards. It is very satisfying in the OpenGL 3-d world! It reminds me of the original Tron and (spoiler!) what happens to the MCP at the end.
4) The game moves between the modes pretty fluidly, and you can restart the game.
Along the way, I was getting some distressing messages from the debugger. I use the "NSLog" command quite a bit, so I suspect these have been getting lost in the clutter - they were memory warnings. Somehow, I was running out of RAM space. Mostly, they were just level 1 errors, but I actually got a level 2 one tonight. This didn't seem likely, since my chips are of a finite number, and there just aren't that many polygons and variables in this game, compared to most 3d fare...
So I wondered if I had too many graphics loaded in memory at one time. I rewrote the menus and buttons (widgets) code so they loaded when needed and unloaded when they were done. It was a bit of a pain, and I worry a little bit about the speed at which they will load now. That didn't fix it.
I stumbled upon the answer when a memory warning showed up between two closely spaced NSLogs - in fact the only thing I did between them was move a Chip! It turns out that every time I moved one of the chips, I created a new 3d vector to represent the displacement of the Chip on that animation interval - and I never relinquished the memory. Multiply that by 100 chips and multiply it again by the number of animation steps during the game - it became a pretty big leak! So with one line, I patched that one... I wonder how many more I have missed.
What's left?
- Reworking the timing of the Ring chips
- Adding in the strange shaped selectors
- Redoing the sound at the end of the game to match up with the animation
- Possibly changing the single-click behavior to a double-click one.
- Auditing for memory leaks
- Figuring out how to get this thing into the store!
Dare I say I'm in the home stretch?
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