I have recently changed the Physics Engine I am using to nVidia's PhysX as this had much better documentation than bullet and I didn't get much response from the Bullet Forums. The Bullet Functionality is still there so I could revert back if needs be. 

It has taken me a while to get PhysX integrated with my engine and also trying to maintain a generic structure. I finally got it working well and I have also implemented the one thing I was struggling to do with Bullet, which is callbacks. 

Essentially all they do is report when specified pairs collide so you can do some sort of game logic, in my case this was when the ball bounced with the floor or with an area that was out of play. Anyway enough talking here is a video of it in action: 

Okay so it isn't that impressive but it is the foundation for every other sort of interaction between physics objects and in game logic. Now that I have got these bare essentials in I can now put the physics stuff to one side and concentrate on some of the game logic. The next few things that are coming up are: 

• A game class that can send messages to the desired parts of the game and deal with keeping score and stopping and starting play.
• Shadow Mapping for the ball as it is hard to visualise depth at the moment.
• Mouse Picking to allow you to use the mouse to aim your shot.
• Animation to allow the use of a full character model instead of a racquet

Well there is still lots to be done and most of these things are pretty large pieces of functionality, I'm hoping to get at least one thing done very shortly as I seem to be on a roll at the moment. 

Cheers :)

The WWDC was massive this year with apple showing off some major design changes with iOS 7 and also the release of the new Mac Pro which has also taken a large visual design change. One thing I noticed is that with iOS 7 a lot of the design features really take away the need for people to "Jailbreak" their iPhone. Things like the shortcuts to the Bluetooth and Flashlight are things that were available in these Jail Broken versions. One of the main things that I really liked is how seemless they have integrated with social networking, with the use of the share sheet ( Something I think I will definitely be putting in my app  ).

Apple have obviously been looking at how other app developers have been creating their apps and seem to have favoured this idea of a slide out menu that is seen in many apps now. This combined with the multi-tasking that is now available really makes the iPhone much more efficient to use. No need to close an app and then open another you can just switch between the two fairly easily.

On a more technical note, apple seem to have spent a lot of time developing more energy efficient ways for the new OSX Maverick ( Should definitely have been called Sea Lion ). This from what they have said will give up to 12 hours of battery life in the 13" Mac Airs. This is something that really needed looking at, technology was getting faster and more powerful but the energy side was always lagging so it's nice that they have taken a look at various ways of combating these issues and it seems to have worked. 

One final point is the Car technology that they talked about, i think if this really takes off then it will be really useful and would eliminate the need to carry around bulky hands free kits. This will definitely only be features available in the top models of cars I'm sure but over time it will become pretty standard. 


Lots of exciting new things and I acn't wait to get my hands on iOS 7 and have a play around. 

Keep it easy :)

For a while I have been struggling with snapping a a view to a grid, as for some strange reason the view was snapping to the grid one off where it should have been in some situations. After a lot of playing around and visualising the views frame I realised that the frame was wrong. This took me by surprise as It was something I really relied on in my snapping code, especially the frame origin. With my views I also rotated them by 90 degrees using the setTransform method which I later realised was the problem case. After searching around on the internet I found a website that mentioned this exact thing, It turns out that if you use the setTransform method or in fact change the transform of a view to anything but the identity matrix then the frame is completely unreliable. To me this seems pretty strange and is something I thought apple would have taken care of as it has set me back a few days ( pretty frustrating ). 

I have now got past this little hurdle and everything is starting to run more smoothly now, I just changed all my snapping code to use the views centre(center if you are american). Changing this single thing literally sorted all the snapping out and I've managed to put some more of my game play in. 

The artist I'm working with has done some more artwork and I'm hoping to get that in soon and maybe I will show a video and you can all see the Idea I'm working on. 

Keep coding :)

I have been persisting with iOS Development and my app is starting to come along now. Lately I have been focusing on implementing the "Single Player" aspect of the game, mostly because I was sick of not being able to show people what it actually does. It's still slow going at the moment but it is definitely moving in the right direction. My Idea of having something on the app store within a few months of getting my Mac was naive to say the least. At the current rate I am hoping to have something that is worthy of a first release by the winter, plus I think people are more likely to play in winter. 

On a technical note, I have been working a lot with delegates in Objective C and they seem very powerful. They also work very well with the MVC pattern. 

One of my main issues is working in the different view spaces. In my app I have to do a lot calculations for positioning different views pragmatically but due to the hierarchy of subviews you have to take extra caution to ensure you are doing the calculations relative to the same view. 

Things are starting to pick up slightly and I will soon have a fully working prototype, once that happens I will upload a video and let everyone see what it is I am working on, but until then it's a secret ;)

Cheers :)

So far in my game I have been using Bullet Physics which is a free to use, open source physics engine. This was great for quite a while but I ran into some issues fairly early on. The next part of the functionality I wanted to implement was the ability to let the game know when the ball goes out of play. This can be done either by the ball bouncing twice or hitting the wall in a invalid position. To implement this needed some ability to test the collision of two certain objects and then call some sort of callback or trigger to do the game specific logic, which turned out to be more difficult than it first seemed in Bullet. I played around with it for quite a while, attempted to look at the documentation of which there is nearly none. I finally gave up and searched around on the forums and eventually asked a question myself to which there was no reply. Finally after wasting a lot of time I decided to look elsewhere, which is when i found nVidia's PhysX. I researched a little, making sure they had better documentation and ensuring that there was examples of the functionality I wanted to create, which there was. So now I am currently in the middle of switching to this new physics engine.  

Technically I am not switching the two I am just providing the functionality for the new Engine as all my code is wrapped up so that you can easily replace 3rd party libraries. It is still taking some time as I am having to learn this new API, although I have noticed that the Physics engine all tend to follow the same names such as "Actors" and "DynamicRigidBody". I will hopefully have a new demo up and running before you know it, I am still trying to juggle iOS development at the same time as this project and it is taking its toll on both projects. 

Keep it easy :)