Day 9It's time to call this done. I can't spend any more time on the prototype and it's as ready for evaluation as it needs to be for now.
At last I added in cracks and they add a little bit of urgency to your dam building. The faster the water flows past your dam, the more it starts cracking your structure. This usually happens if you leave a narrow corridor somewhere, which is a usual side effect of not getting the right pieces and only concentrating on another part of the dam.
The way I code things in objective-c has certainly reached its limits. Creating a lot of objects in your game loop is definitely not the way to go - which is a thing I already learned in XNA, but unfortunately objective-c doesn't have structs the way C# does them, so I created all structures as classes. This means vector and matrix calculations (which are structs in XNA) all need allocations on the heap and releasing in each game loop. This, together with other structs like Point and Color, makes the releasing of the memory 25% of the game loop.
Good enough on the simulator, not good enough on the iPad. While the thing is playable, it's definitely not something to pitch your idea. Thankfully this just needs to be good enough to evaluate in-house.
I'm off to studying for exams and I'll also be off mac for a while, until Lion comes along. So unfortunately any XNI tutorials and upgrades will have to wait.
Here is the final screenshot and a video of playing with disaster.
Video:
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