AirPlay Mirroring was without a doubt, one of the coolest iOS 5 features announced to the public at the 2011 WWDC Keynote. This amazing technology allows you to display the screen of your iOS device on an Apple TV 2. At the moment, the only supported mirroring device is the iPad 2 and the receiving device is limited to only the second generation Apple TV. Airplay Mirroring is the latest in a series of Apple media streaming technologies. The previous entry in the family was Airplay Video, which is a slightly different technology that allows specific content to be broadcast from a variety of iOS devices and iTunes to an Apple TV 2. The precursor to that technology was originally called AirTunes, and is used to broadcast audio content from iOS devices and iTunes to the AirPort Express and Apple TV (either first gen or second gen). One peculiar thing people noted about AirPlay Video was that it’s wide open and unencrypted! This was surprising in light of the fact that AirTunes was most definitely not. Because of AirPlay Video’s relatively easy hackability, there quickly sprang up all manner of apps for both Mac OS X and iOS which would act as an AirPlay Video consumer.

So my thought process went like thus:

• AirTunes – Encrypted
• AirPlay Video – Unencrypted
• AirPlay Mirroring – ???

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As a partial follow up to my previous article “Play SNES Games On Your iPad Without Jailbreaking” I have now made a similar patch to the imame4all project which will allow it to build for non-jailbroken iOS devices. Everything appears to be in order except that I havn’t figured out a way to get the BTDaemon to run on a non-jailbroken device. This means that it can’t currently use Bluetooth controllers like the Wiimote. Digging into the btstack source it looks like you can configure it to talk with a BTDaemon process even if it is running on another machine like a Mac. I havn’t had time to fully investigate that yet though.

How To Get It Working Yourself

I have created a patch and script that will create everything for you automatically and set you up so that you can just build, run and go. Like the SNES-HD- patch before, you are going to need a current copy of Apple’s Developer Tools (tested with Xcode 3.2.6) and a copy of the iOS SDK (my changes assume the 4.3 SDK). You will need to be a paid iOS developer with Apple and have correctly configured your development machine and iOS device so that you can sign code and run said code on your device.

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So you’re successful right? How successful? Let us count the ways. Let us count them by ranking you against your peers with an Elo ranked leaderboard and achievements. Remember that your worth can now be quantified and compared, so be sure to push your numbers as high as you can. “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good”. Welcome to the Wall Street update.

Complete Changelist:

• Bumped engineCompatibility to 0.5.10. (this means all games previously created by versions <= 0.5.9 will be deleted)
• Fixed a bug with the friction attachements that was casuing divergence.
• Taking another initial stab at redoing the cluster picker menu.
• Initial stab at 2X UI for the iPad.
• Added in-game stats panes and leaderboards.
• Designed the profile page and got initial replay functionality implemented.
• Made some changes to speed up app initialization.
• Added more capability to the stat gathering functionality.
• Added “Judge” capability.
• Added all the server-side support for interacting with judges and passing judgement on games.
• Added more stats functionality and judge bug fixes.
• Refined convex sweeping to only be super aggressive when dealing with the (thin) terrain.
• Fixed some concurrent loading bugs.
• Fixed a sound loading bug.
• Added a pragma to skip the intro.

I described the initial set of achievements that I had come up with in a previous blog post. For this update these are the achievements that are actually implemented and currently earnable:

Alpha Testing List

Would you like to be one of the awesome alpha testers that help make Cannonade great? Send an email to: [email protected] and I will reply with instructions on how to get onto the Trac server, Testflight list and tester forums.

One crucial aspect of my game that I have been thinking of for a while has been that of in-game achievements. There is just something about the hormones that get secreted in your brain the first time that sound or notification goes off that hooks you like the first line. I have come up with an initial set of 40 achievements that I will hopefully have implemented by the next seed. Your challenge: tell me what you think in the comments below, let me know of any cool ideas you have for achievements and bonus points for anyone that can name all the movie, video game or cultural references below.

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Did you know that bullets (and other quick moving objects) in video games sometimes exhibit magical properties if they move too fast? If they gain enough speed, sometimes they can even pass completely through other objects without leaving a scratch or affecting them at all! You might have seen this happen occasionally in games that have a lot of complicated physics simulation. Sometimes fast moving objects just seem to pass through the ground or other objects. Unfortunately this is not a desirable user experience and it quickly breaks the illusion the game is trying to convey. This phenomenon is called “tunneling” and game developers attempt to deal with it in a variety of different ways. I thought I would share my unique combination of techniques to deal with it that I used in Cannonade. I have not seen this specific combination of techniques explained or suggested anywhere and so I thought it might be beneficial to share what I have learned with others who might also be suffering from object tunneling woes. First lets explain how most modern game physics simulation works and investigate why this problem crops up.

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Apple gets a lot of flack over its curated app distribution model. No matter what your opinion on the subject is there is no doubt that for Apple’s model to have any sort of success it needs to be the only commercially realistic distribution avenue on the platform. This leads many people to jailbreak their devices for a variety of different reasons. Lets examine just the motivation of wanting to personally use non-App Store approved apps. The argument is then almost always framed as a dichotomy. I can jailbreak and get access to apps that Apple cannot or will not approve but risk damaging the device, violating warranty/support expectation, losing the ability to directly update to the latest OS version and introducing instability. Or I could keep my device in a stock configuration that will ensure stability and a clean upgrade path but miss out on some truly awesome and useful jailbroken apps out there. People don’t often remember that there is actually a third way to load apps onto your iOS device that has its own set of unique pros and cons. Apple fully supports loading apps on stock devices outside of the App Store through its developer program.

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I have decided to give names to all of my alpha updates going forward. I have chosen to follow a movie theme naming convention. I am therefore proud to announce the “Primer” update (Cannonade 0.5.9). Aptly named, this update finally adds the timeline scrubbing feature! This feature allows you to pause and restart the game at any point in the past by dragging the timeline slider and hitting the play button. Perforated glass doors quickly shut and you hear the low hum of time travel occurring in the background. Once the universe has temporally moved to your desired point the doors open and you can watch history repeat itself!

Complete Changelist:

• Bumped engineCompatibility to 0.5.9. (this means all games previously created by versions <= 0.5.8 will be deleted)
• Got the timeline scrubbing working!
• Added a neat glass door progress indicator when you jump through time.
• Moved auto-camera to only be active during opponent’s turns.
• Did a top to bottom redesign of the cluster menu
• Added basic OpenGL lighting to blocks.
• Added an initial pass of the intro sequence.
• Moved the castle picking view to one-quarter height up.
• Used glPolygonOffest to correct decal the friction splatter.
• Changed the editor so that it moves the camera to the half-height everytime the blocks change.
• Baked the current levels and fixed some bugs related to baking.
• Added history grabbing functionality.
• Fixed a lot of bugs related to observing various points in the timeline.
• Modified the project so that I could submit a dummy IPA to iTunes Connect so I can keep my identifier (I hope).
• Made a new Pad+Phone based experience.plist.
• Changed the level’s info format from a serliazed file to an NSDictionary/plist.
• TONS of changes aimed at making it easy to integrate art.
• Removed the individual block textures now that the atlas is working everywhere.
• Pulling demo/intro values into the experience.plist.
• Initial demo intro game type implementation.
• Added a dummy account loging pragma (LOGINASAORENTEST1).
• Minor tweaks.

Alpha Testing List

Would you like to be one of the awesome alpha testers that help make Cannonade great? Send an email to: [email protected] and I will reply with instructions on how to get onto the Trac server, Testflight list and tester forums.

The focus of this update is the new in-game tutorial! Now when you first launch Cannonade if you have never run through the tutorial it will prompt you to do so. The tutorial level is meant to teach new players how to use the battle interface and get them some target practice with the fundamentals. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think!

Complete Changelist:

• Bumped engineCompatibility to 0.5.8. (this means all games previously created by versions <= 0.5.7 will be deleted)
• Initial implementation of the tutorial game type and level.
• Made some menu refinements and added a “Wiki/File A Bug” menu option.
• Made it so that you are prompted to run through the tutorial if you havn’t before on that device.
• A few quick menu sound effects.
• Added detailed statistics gathering.
• Fixed lots of little simulation execution bugs.
• Tons of leak hunting.
• Added friends info to the game server packets and cleaned up the server code a bit.

Alpha Testing List

Would you like to be one of the awesome alpha testers that help make Cannonade great? Send an email to: [email protected] and I will reply with instructions on how to get onto the Trac server, Testflight list and tester forums.

For the past week I have been working on creating a gameplay tutorial mode for Cannonade. I am pretty pleased with how it has come out! There are still enhancements to be made and polish to be applied but I think it is good enough to put into the next seed. It is meant to explain the interface and get you some basic gameplay practice before you go up against real people online. It reveals the interface step by step, explains how you use it and lets you get some hands on experience with each concept as it is introduced. If you have never completed the tutorial before then it is the first thing that runs when you launch Cannonade. Previously the only way to figure out how to play was to just press buttons and experiment around after you had already entered a game with a real person. Hopefully by adding the tutorial I can help teach people about how to play the game before they play for reals.

The two most note worthy changes in this build are SPEED and WEAPONS! After spending two days on physics performance optimization and a week and a half on graphics performance optimization Cannonade now runs a lot faster on both the iPhone and the iPad! There are still speed gains to be had but the framerate difference is like night and day. Thanks to your voting, in this build we also have the debut of the Gravity Bomb, Fire Bomb and Friction Bomb weapons. They still need to be tweaked and balanced but they are still fun to play with. Give them a shot!

Complete Changelist:

• Bumped engineCompatibility to 0.5.7. (this means all games previously created by versions <= 0.5.6 will be deleted)
• Did a lot more investigation into physics performance. Content with how much I have for now.
• A HUGE graphics performance related commit.
• Added the Gravity Bomb, Fire Bomb and Friction Bomb weapons.
• Added powerSlider tuning buttons
• Added a block override fade timer
• Added all sorts of neat effects to the gravity, fire and friction bombs.
• Added a new lava island level to design around the !FOGENABLED and NONBLENDEDLAVA speedups.
• Initial “connection-less” Game Center implementation. Initial support for key-based communication (added libcrypto.a)
• Added a label toggle button in game and removed the reticle label fade.
• Reworked the visual styling of the shootMenu.
• Abandoned scrolling on weaponScrollView because UIScrollView is too buggy.
• Added BlockAttachements.
• Added CANNON_IMPACT and BLOCK_POOF emitter types.
• Tweaked Gravity Bomb effects.
• Removed old levels.
• Fixed a bug where resetCollisionFilters was not being called (killed replay).
• Extended ASGlassButton to handle corners.
• Fixed some ASGlassButton issues that were causing uneccessary redraw.
• Added a biased decal shape as a hack until http://aorensoftware.dyndns.org:8000/TRAC/ticket/145 gets fixed.
• Refined convex sweep tunnel protection even further.
• Added convex sweep querying to block movements as well.
• Added LOCALMODELVIEW so that we don’t stall OpenGL everytime we need to read/update the camera matrix.
• Added more benchmarking oriented functionality and updated libbullet.a.
• Tweaked build settings and switched compilers to llvm-gcc4.2.
• Fixed the editor back into working shape.
• Fixed cull and texture state for projectiles until they get their real objects.
• Fixed big in terrain removal code that was smashing memory.
• Fixed some block label override bugs.
• Fixed key loading.
• Fixed projectile state dirtying.
• Added an in-game fps counter.
• Added server games auditing to the ADMIN_MENU.
• Checks first before copying into history now.
• Misc bug fixes.

Alpha Testing List

Would you like to be one of the awesome alpha testers that help make Cannonade great? Send an email to: [email protected] and I will reply with instructions on how to get onto the Trac server, Testflight list and tester forums.