Tuesday, June 7, 2011

NA Flags Live Wallpaper v1.5

  - Update: Now using OpenGL 2.0
  - Update: Higher framerate on tablets
  - Update: Smoother animation
  - Update: Custom flags now get ripples/cloth embossing

This update represents a substantial rewrite of this product, but doesn't really look much different, or at least shouldn't.  What we got instead was a general raft of improvements.

Firstly, we're now backing the flag blend and texture together at startup, which means we can now do everything all in one pass.  This nearly doubles our framerate on Tegra tablets.  It also means that we can get rid of the 'simple lighting' pref, since there's no longer a big speed improvement to be had by disabling the second pass.

Since we have proper acess to vertex shaders, we're also now using animation blending, so the flag's framerate will now go as high as your phone does.  That's a big improvement over the ~20ish that the flag animated at before, and it's quite noticable when placed side by side.

In addition, we're using render to texture to bake the cloth texture and ripples in at startup time, which means any custom flag images will get that as well.  That's probably a general improvement -- if we need to add a checkbox to disable that we can.  It also means you can basically just use a Wikipedia flag image verbatim and it'll look basically the same as the ones we've included, which wasn't the case before.

All told, I think this is a pretty nice update.  Please shoot us an e-mail with any problems!

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