Indie game dev here who has launched a couple of games on iOS and my biggest irritant is by far the development tools. XCode is dogshit compared to Visual Studio. The current version of VS for MacOS doesn't support native development and is being retired. Apparently MS is working on something new for this space but not holding my breath. I roll my own native C++ based game engine and getting it building and working in XCode and finally signed is always long winded pain in the ass made worse with Apple's yearly developer fee for the "privilege" of publishing to their sub-par app store AND taking a 15% cut off every sale as well. They also deprecated OpenGL so while legacy game engines (such as mine) that support OpenGL will work, to really get the best performance, you need to re-write your render back end to support Metal which will take quite some time to do. It'd be nice if Apple could continue OpenGL or even Vulkan support but that likely won't happen anytime soon (ever) Whatever Apple is doing, I hope they are actually listening to the devs. These are all reasons echoed by many game developers as to why they just avoid Apple platforms. My games do well on Android but they barely made enough to cover the yearly fee on the Apple platform. I'm going to try one more time and include Mac support along with iDevices and see how that goes but that will probably be the last stand for me especially since Linux has taken the #2 spot from MacOS on Steam. That said, hardware wise, I've always been impressed with the performance of iDevices. They got that part right at least. And going full ARM for all their CPU architecture was the right move as it's superior to x86.

It's a nice engine for people who want to get going quickly and it's very artist friendly which is ideal as coders shouldn't be fucking around with art related tasks. On PC/Mac, I could definitely look into Unity but for mobile I'll avoid it for another little while as it IS pretty CPU heavy. Their C# like script language (mono) runs on a mono-emulation layer which interprets the byte code at run time which is nice to make it platform agnostic but it will cost you! I'm not sure if this has been upgraded to do JIT compiling.. I would hope they did but a lot of coders I know who are doing mobile projects with unity have speed as their biggest complaint! Even simple games with minimal geometry and shaders doesn't run nearly as quick as it should!

As a soon to be full-time mobile game developer, I had done some research into the Android platform and it turns out targeting version 2.1 and up is the way to go: http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html 12.6% are still running 1.6 and 1.7. Not only that 2.1 devices are much more capable with faster CPU and GPUs. In my case, I plan to make an engine that run OpenGL ES 2.0 only. Screw 1.1 and it's fixed function pipeline and its wimpy ARM 9 CPU's!

If only it were so simple. As a kid I was always in the middle of dirt and germs. I was a filthy kid... guess what, that didn't do SHIT as I still had plenty of food allergies to contend with. Granted nothing life threatening but food allergies are not pleasant at all.

Good acid... he takes a lot! I'm guessing a super dose of white clinical.. that shit will really make your mind bend space and time or so you think.

I've always enjoyed coding with MS build chains. Coding the XBOX360 is so straight forward as is making Win32 apps that use D3D. Same with the Windows Mobile devices. It's a breeze to write and debug apps with Visual Studio. However, hardware support is another story. They introduced Direct3D Mobile in Windows Mobile 5 but because WinMo up to now has been something of a wild west, some devices had D3D drivers while others didn't. And the ones that did weren't the best. Very few did OpenGL ES. You could however, quite easily get access to the linear frame buffer and just write your own rasterizers which worked quite well! I've talked with some WinMobile insiders and they told me that WinMo 7 would be way stricter when it came to hardware and device variance. OpenGL ES would be the norm and would replace Direct3D Mobile. If they can sort the hardware issues and force manufactures (HTC you listening, you ass clowns) to implement quality drivers, they could very much regain from 4th spot where they are now!

I didn't expect the Conservatives to do a fucking thing on this one! Goodness forbid they tell a Canadian company that they can't fuck over their clients. The NDP and Greens have been the most vocal about making a big change in the Telco industry! The Liberals.... meh I'm sure if you pressured hard enough they would do something.

Ironically it was the US who was principally involved in the formation of the Taliban in the first place.

Actually that was the Unreal 1 engine that did that.

STAPH doesn't stand a chance against it and it won't fuck up your bacterial flora in your gut like anti-biotics will (thus further weakening your immune system).

Unless I'm coding some high speed spASM code... In regular C/C++ I stick to commenting a whole block as opposed to each line. I've worked with overly anal coders who code each line.. I want to kick them in the teeth.

I've had mixed success with it as far as cognitive functioning goes. Taken alone, I've noticed a little improvement but nothing drastic. Depending on the brand I would actually get a big of an allergic reaction from it! Im trying a new formula called Memory Essentials. It contains: Alpha-Glycerylphosphorycholine (alpha-GPC) (from soy) - 250 mg Vitamin B6 (as pyridoxine HCI) - 76 mg Folic Acid - 100 mcg Vitamin B12 (as cyanocobalamin, methycobalamin) - 50 mcg Pantothenic Acid (as calcium panthothenate) - 100 mg Phosphatidylserine Complex (from soy) - 100 mg Green Tea Extract (leaf) - 100 mg Blueberry Powder - 50 mg Ginkgo Biloba Extract - 100 mg Giving it a try this month. It;s making a difference no doubt but not sure how big. I'll go without it next month and compare. How ever one supplement that DEFINITLY makes a difference for me is L-Tyrosine as it's a precursor to L-Dopa aka dopamine. My main problem area has always been focus over memory retention. Used to take ritalin as a kid, that shit made me into a zombie!

With C++ filming it all....

The reason the byte code runs so fast is that ARM cpu's with the Jazelle extension can execute byte code directly on the CPU! Oh and ya very good point about NOT going crazy with malloc/frees in your code... that's just retarded!