Forums » Impact Engine » iOSImpact Beta: This demands a re-post.

@Dom did you test it on an iPad? Curious abt the performance

I just gave it a whirl on my iPad and it seems to work just as well. Would be interesting to see the performance with a game that utilizes more of the iPad's screen real estate.

@Dominic, I haven't tried with XCode 3.x because I worried having both versions will cause problems with some of my other projects. If you know how to make Impact work with XCode 4, please advise. It looks like it's just not finding JavaScriptCore library

I got a new Mac the other day; installed xcode 4.0.2 now and was able to build iOSImpact without any problems.

Is the first error in your screenshot the very first error you see when building it? Is it for the Impact.h file? As you said, it seems that Xcode somehow can't find the JavaScriptCore header files. These files should be in the project directory in JavaScriptCore/ and also in Xcode under "Other Sources/JavaScriptCore/".

Can you try changing line 2 in Classes/Impact/Impact.h from

#import "JavaScriptCore/JavaScriptCore.h"

to

#import <JavaScriptCore/JavaScriptCore.h>

If that doesn't work, go to the project's Build Settings and look for "Header Search Paths". The value should be the directory with your project files - when you double click it (to edit it) it should say ${SOURCE_ROOT}. Try enabling the "Recursive" checkbox.

I couldn't get it to work using your suggestions so I re-downloaded the source, and NOW it seems to work just fine. I'm not sure what the problem was. Thanks for your help.

EDIT : I just tested on another computer and on the iPad device. Everything works perfectly. This is everything I hoped for!

Curious why no mention of AppMobi on the blog post? We've been going full force with support of ImpactJS for HTML5 gaming and will be at E3 talking about it.

Ken at TapJS is doing some awesome stuff to help us with mobile integration.

Damn, I honestly don't know how I missed that, sorry :/ Updated the post. I really appreciate the work you're doing and I think AppMobi is great to get something up and running on many platforms.

The "theme" of my blog post however, was to show that a UIWebView on iOS may not be the best solution for games right now. iOSImpact is only a temporary "workaround", till Apple fixes the problems in Mobile Safari. I really hope that we don't need it anymore in a year or two.

The nice thing about Dominc's solution is that it uses Open GL for graphics.

OK i noticed something interesting about those errors messages I was getting.

It only happens if the project is inside a Dropbox folder. As soon as I copy it to the desktop and open it there, it compiles without a problem. But if I open it while it's inside a Dropbox folder, XCode 4 doesn't even wait for me to compile to tell me it there are errors. This "live" code warning system is new in XCode 4 and it must mean that there's something about having it in a Dropbox folder that doesn't allow it to find the right path to import a file.

This is strange because all my other XCode projects work fine in Dropbox.

maybe there is a "space" in one of the folder name ?

@potan, that was it! It had nothing to do with Dropbox. I had it inside a folder called Impact JS with a space. I changed it to ImpactJS and now it compiles. Thanks for noticing this simple problem and posting about it.

I much prefer this iOSImpact beta to appMobi.

It took me about 10 minutes to get my ImpactJS game working on my iPhone using the iOSImpact Beta. And the game is brilliantly fast compared to using Mobile Safari.

It took me about 20 minutes to get to the point where I realized I was never going to use appMobi. Anything that requires Chrome, downloads a Java app, and requires that I login to my web based editor where my code is stored in "the cloud" is not free.

Quote from ape
Anything that requires Chrome, downloads a Java app, and requires that I login to my web based editor where my code is stored in "the cloud" is not free.

I'm not sure what you mean by not free, since it is :) You can make an app from scratch and submit it to both the Android and iPhone stores with no charge from us. We offer services such as push messaging and in app analytics but they are optional if you want to enhance your app

As for "the cloud", your files stored locally are also stored in the cloud. When you want to test on device you push your local files to the cloud then the device pulls down the same files. This allows you to test your app anywhere on any device (with applab installed).

I also agree Dominic's iOSImpact is impressive, I just wanted to let you know how appmobi works :D

@Ape, I 100% agree that IOSImpact is impressive and a great option for the folks who own a Mac and want to only develop for IOS and will develop only using Canvas and JS.

But to come to AppMobi's defense a bit because I think part of your statement was unfair. Personally I think their offering is a great solution for us non Mac owners and those like myself that want to develop using the other html elements. Plus their api that lets me tie into some of the phones features is awesome! The other thing that is awesome about AppMobi, is that I can easily test and deploy to Android and Iphone with little more then a push of a button.

I'm NOT debating or saying you are incorrect about wanting to use one solution over another. I think we all have our own coding styles and requirements that lead us to choose one over another. But to your point about not being Free, they clearly are. Unless I wish to use one of their Cloud Services, I don't pay a cent and they still provide me with an awesome tool and service to allow me to easily turn my js game into a mobile app.

Now if you meant "Free" as in "no proprietary code" or "open source" because their offering is closed source and relies on certain technologies ... dude, you're on a Mac! Apple is the poster child for "Not Free" :P

I think both solutions are awesome, but serve two different needs. So while they are similar I don't think you can compare them as "Apples to Apples". As usual Dominic is a Wizard and created something very cool with IOSImpact and the folks at AppMobi are providing a great free service and are also really championing both the html5 and Impact community. For that I am thankful to both of them.

eh, just my two cents.

give appMobi some time, they're fixing some issues, and should start to kick serious ass in 3.4.0

iOSImpact is awesome, but according to Dom's post, it's still a put-together-hack, and might not be sustained once Apple changes something in their developer agreement.

@fugufish, I think what Domonic meant was that the code needs to be cleaned up, ie, it doesn't break any rules in the iOS guidelline that I can see. It's a clever solution.

Dominic, I've been able to get my game up and running on the iphone simulator, though it appears that some of my background and image layers are not rendering at all (ive tried both with and without prerender=true)... I'm only seeing my entities. Any thoughts on this, or have you seen this before?

Thanks!

Darrin: maybe the tilesets or images are too big? The texture size limit on the iPhone is 2048 x 2048 px, I believe. Also, I only tested iOSImpact with PNG images - maybe there's a problem with JPEGs or GIFs?

I don't know what else could cause this. If you want to, you can send me your files and I'll have a closer look at it when I get back home next week.

This is very exciting, I have a zombie puzzle game in the works and I'm wondering, using iOSImpact, do I still get access to all the html5 features, local storage specifically?

2048x2048 for OpenGL ES2 and 1024x1024 for pre-3GS, if I remember correctly.

I should give appMobi a second, less skeptical, chance.

I'm all for tools that help grow the community of JS game developers.

Hi,

I'd like to know, how big is the performance/fps increase with iOSimpact compared to same device safari browser? Just on average please :)

Massive. I tried out one of my prototypes that was getting ~10fps on mobile Safari and it now hits the +60 mark. :D