Wire Whizz - ‘A History’ Part 2
Early Development
For early development I wanted to see graphics on screen I bodged up the context and was drawing the ubiquitous spinning cube, to me this is the 3D analogue for “Hello World”.
After some tinkering I found that I could shift about 11K of polys per frame if drawn with one call, and lit with one light and still achieve ~30fps. Not sparkling, but not fantastic - though I recall working as games developer in 2000 and being wowed because some of the scenes were made up of a similar number of polys - granted 11K in one draw callon the iPhone and back in the heady days of DirectX 7 (quite possibly 6 was the first half decent API IMHO), we were spamming the API with many calls per object - doing so on the iPhone has a detrimental affect on performance.
Ma-waige (think Peter Cook, The Princess Bride)
At this point my fiance and I took the plunge and got married, this was November 2008, I’d had an idea for the Wire Whizz game, but owing to the fact that I was getting married (oh and did I mention that I was changing jobs as well?), Wire Whizz, or iWire as it was known in my head back then, took a back seat.
Getting the Ball Rolling
After Christmas 2008 I started to tinker with the iPhone again. I had some recent 3D code that was running on the PC and as the iPhone can run Objective-C, C++ and the powerful (IMHO) hybrid of Objective-C++, I began to port the engine to the iPhone.