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SoCoder -> Blogs Home -> Blogs

 
Jayenkai
Created : 02 October 2010
 
System : Mac

Fighting for Battery Life
As some of you might already know, I've been steering away from regular plain old cheap style iPod development, and doing things the insanely difficult way.
One of the main reasons I'm doing this is that I LOVE to play Scrabble on my iPod.
Scrabble's one of those "takes an hour per game" sort of games, and it's great for having a go, leaving it sitting, coming back, and playing the next word.

Except EA's Scrabble is fucking shit.
It uses OpenGL mode, which instantly goes "Fuck you, Battery!!" and drains the smeg out of it, as if it's trying to be a fully fledged amazing 3D engine.
It's not, though.
It's only pissing Scrabble.

You get approximately 1 hour of playtime, when on full-on OpenGL mode, which, for a 1 hour game, means you can play 1 game of Scrabble before you have to recharge the damn iPod again.

Quite frankly, that takes the piss.

For something simple, like Angry Birds, I don't mind it. I can hop in, play, hop out. It's quick, it's easy, I'm fine with that.
But Scrabble's just not on.

And it's exactly the same with EA's Monopoly and Trivial Persuit games. Except those games usually last a fuckload longer than your battery will, even though they're still just pissing well Board games, which don't bloody well need OpenGL in the slightest.


I'm coding the other way.
I'm keeping things simple, and only using UIViews, and other "Base" iPod functions, to try and keep the battery life up as much as I possibly can.

Except now, I have to deal with Audio.
I thought I had it, but apparently the audio method I'm using is locked to the volume of your Ringer, not the volume of the rest of the system. Meaning, if you turn the volume down on the iPod, but accidentally leave your ringer on full blast, then try to play Cardagain, it goes "WAAAAH!!!" in your face!
.. fucknuts..

I'm currently having to wrap my head around OpenAL to get the audio to work, but am worried that using "OpenAnything" might result in Battery usage.
I'm hoping it doesn't.
bollocks..

Has anyone else dealt with this audio crap, yet?
I'd love to hear any opinions..

 

Comments
Tuesday, 05 October 2010, 05:43
waroffice
 		Im glad to see you didn't hold back there Jay, EA have never really gone for optimum performance recently, well from what i have seen in their PC games.

I can't help with your coding but I did enjoy reading this.
Tuesday, 05 October 2010, 05:52
JL235
 		My phone is similar, it only lasts about a day. Regardless of if I'm listening to music constantly or have it sitting on the side doing nothing it always runs out after 24 hours.

I suspect the coding is really bad on it; that it's not turning off the bits it's not using when idle.