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Has anyone looked at the iPad2's performance with Impact versus the original iPad? Curious if the new processor and such has improved the performance, mainly in terms of frame rate.

no apple store near where I live :(

Thanks anyways fugufish. Well, the suspense was killing me, so I went over to Best Buy, which is closer to me and tried it out. Found a couple of interesting things:

1. As far as I could tell, there is not any change in the performance. This is after trying both Biolab Disaster and Drop. I also tried a very incomplete game that I have been working on and it didn't work so well. It still needs to be optimized though.

2. This is in some ways more interesting and encouraging: I took a look at what other web pages people had open and what did I find? Kongregate and GamesFreak.net. Of course you can't play any of those games (as far as I can tell) on the iPad, because they're all Flash!

I think there is huge void for HTML5 games to fill.

(BTW. Naturally, I left the iPad with the Drop game displayed to bring more exposure to Impact. Drop works really well on the iPad and has the nice Impact logo displayed.)

i'm just waiting for sound to get fixed on the iOS before going all in....

i'm okay with a low FPS, i suppose we can't get a 2d shooter with that, but other games like Drop, Solitaire, BattleShips don't need a high fps! They're still pretty darned addictive!

@MikeL LOL .. leaving the games open. Talk about Guerrilla Marketing! Brilliant!

Thanks for posting your findings. Very interesting.

Ha, awesome! Thanks :D

I guess the drawing performance of the canvas element is still the limiting factor for Impact games, even on the iPad2. It get's really slow with higher resolutions :/


Anyway, I recently began to work on an OpenGL implementation of the canvas element again. Similar to what I did back in October, but this time in a non hack-ish way and (hopefully) AppStore compliant.

This will solve most of the problems (performance, sound, multitouch) if you're willing to release your game in the AppStore instead of for (or additional to) the web.

Very cool about the OpenGL implementation Dominic. It's kind of funny, because I was just thinking the other day, maybe I could make an initial web-based version of a game that essentially advertises that a more completer/faster/niftier version can be found on the iPad/iPhone as an app.

I was originally going to save up and plunk down a bunch of cash for a MacBook Pro - to use for work and home - and do some iPad SDK development. Then I saw Biolab on Hacker News and I said woh! Scripted game development (fast/fun) versus Objective C development (tedious, need to fork out big $$ for my ideal Mac). I know what I'm going to do!

At them time even, I thought maybe I'll use Impact to prototype games, then rewrite them in Objective C once I've got them where I want them.

Bottom line of this long winded-story is that it will be really fantastic to be able to just re-use the same code to make an OpenGl based iPad/iPhone/iWhatever'sNext app.

Dominic, that would be amazing if you get that built! How exciting!