Each one is being tweaked independently for best performance. Pocket Gamer: There's a large performance gap between first generation iPhone/iPod touches and 3GS devices, so how are you ensuring Warpgate looks as good as it can on all of them? Mark Levin: There are two separate methods of 3D rendering in Warpgate one written for pre-3GS devices and one written for the 3GS and latest iPods. We caught up with programmer Mark Levin to find out how the dev team are dealing with such issues. One game this impacts and that will be pushing the level of graphics on the various systems is Freeverse's space trader and shooter Warpgate. Effectively then, some parts of some games are now having to be made twice: with different rendering pipelines for each standard. It's a particular issue as the newer devices support the OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics standard, which isn't backwards compatible with the OpenGL ES 1.1 standard used by older hardware.
Behind the scenes however developers are having to think carefully about how they deal with the different processing capabilities of first generation iPhones and the 50 percent faster iPhone 3GS and new iPod touches. A massive issue on other mobile devices, handset fragmentation hasn't impacted iPhone yet, at least as far as users are concerned.
