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The Future of Rogue Touch

May 23rd, 2011

Those old-timers that have been visiting ChronoSoft since 2009 know that Rogue Touch has had a long history of updates and added features. After launching in February 2009, it gained things in the following months like D-pad support, leaderboards, bones, and new magic items. Things slowed down when my “day job” projects picked up and of course when Spirit Hunter Mineko started to take shape.

The most recent update to Rogue Touch was back in July of 2010, and contained some enhancements for iOS 4, including retina-display text and multitasking. It also contained some modified display code to address screen update performance in iOS 4.0. Something was broken in Apple’s new OS that had been functioning well since iOS 2.0 – 3.1.3… the drawing performance of CGContextDrawImage dropped to between 1/10 and 1/20th of its original speed prior to iOS 4.0.

I optimized the dungeon and map drawing code and regained much needed speed in iOS 4.0. There was much rejoicing last July… Then things got *even worse* in iOS 4.1. Everything was slowed further, despite my optimizations. I kept holding out hope that another iOS update would rectify the issue, but that we’re in 2011 now, and up to iOS 4.3.X… WWDC is just around the corner, but I’ve given up on iOS CGContext drawing getting fixed.

Rogue Touch was written using the easiest methods I could learn while learning Objective-C and the iPhone & Mac platforms. There are much faster and better ways to get things done… All the cool games use OpenGL, GPU accelerated high-speed drawing!

Coming in June 2011 is an overhaul of the classic! Rogue Touch will gain OpenGL rendering and quite a few new and interesting features. Can’t wait to share it with you all 😉



    3 Responses

  1. I can’t wait!! Rogue Touch has been a staple of mine when I just feel the need to bash creatures!! 😀

    Comment by nghtstr on June 17, 2011 at 4:16 pm

  2. AWESOME – I’ve been playing Rogue since i got my Tandy 1000 way back in the stone age….

    I can’t wait for the update to play it on my iPhone!!!

    -Rusty

    Comment by rmorton on July 5, 2011 at 8:01 pm

  3. Please hurry with the update! Love this game so much and would love to see what you come up with!

    Comment by Morgan on July 12, 2012 at 8:11 pm

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