FingerGaming

“Apple’s iPhone is simply an extraordinary mobile device.”

That’s Rick Baltman, President of 2XL Games, developer of the recently released technical showpiece 2XL Supercross 2009.

Head of arguably the most tech-savvy of iPhone developers, Baltman is a huge proponent of the evolution of the device, even in the shadow of today’s 3G S release which has been deemed by some as incremental, and even potentially fracturing to iPhone development.

Chatting with FingerGaming on the eve of Apple’s newest iteration, the ex-Rainbow Studios engineer talked excitedly about 3.0, the 3G S and beamed with enthusiasm as he described porting their Baja: Edge of Control engine to the iPhone for 2XL Supercross.

“The process of porting 2XL’s game engine onto the iPhone was relatively easy due to some key architecture decisions made while developing the engine for Baja,” says Baltman. “Our game engine was neatly divided into a large set of C++ platform independent classes with interfaces to a small set of platform dependent files that had to be rewritten for each console and the PC.

“The core technology, including the scene graph, physics, animation, collision detection, AI, UI and game logic compiled easily on every platform. The math library and the graphics engine had to be customized.”

He adds, “When we began the port onto the iPhone, the core, multi-platform engine compiled successfully right away, as expected. Our PS3 graphics engine was programmed using OpenGL, so most of it, too, was able to be re-used as is.

“It was only a small amount of work to remove the shader support and replace it with a fixed function pipeline instead. We added the ability to load the Power VR compressed texture format and added a couple of the OpenGL extensions provided on the iPhone for skinning and particles.”

Having pined for tech upgrades in a previous interview conducted just prior to the 3G S unveiling, Baltman says that “some of the specs we were hoping for are in the 3G S” and that 2XL Games will “continue to fully support both devices.”

Though the studio has not yet went hands-on with the upgrade, they are “hopeful that the new hardware architecture along with OpenGL ES 2.0 will remove the graphics bottleneck and free up the CPU to be used for other things besides copying data into the GPU.”

“Combined with the faster CPU,” he continues, ”We should be able to provide improved gameplay and render more complex scenes which could look more like the PS2 and original Xbox graphics.”

For the time being, Baltman assures the developer’s interest in the functionality that OS 3.0 brings to the iPhone 3G. He says, “[We] have several new games in development but track packs, part upgrades, new vehicle classes and even different business models are all new possibilities with the new In App Purchase feature. We can’t wait to see where this new feature, alone, takes the iPhone.”

Tags: 2xl games, 2xl supercross, interview, iphone 3g s, iphone os 3.0, rick baltman