We’re going to take a look at the new features of Propaganda Lander version 1.1. We’ve put quite a few new things into this version and upped the game size by several MB. It still sits nicely under the 20MB 3G download limit.

Gotta Have Tunes

One thing that you might have noticed while playing Propaganda Lander was that there was only one soundtrack for every level. We had always intended to have music for every planet but, was unable to get all the tracks on time before our initial launch. We do have them now!

The whole game is worth playing through again just to hear the planet specific tracks. We’ve also added some more polish to the game so there’s a tad more to see.

Loading Screen

For those of you with a speedy 3GS or iPhone 4, the loading screen probably wasn’t an issue for you. Propaganda Lander would have loaded in under 7 seconds. For those with older iDevices, it would have taken about 2x as long. We have now added an animated load screen in the beginning to help make those 14 seconds more enjoyable!

Settings

There isn’t anything that new in the settings screen except that Facebook features are no longer in this screen and you can turn the vibration feature on or off. The other options for muting Music or Sound Effects are still there and the ability to auto-skip movies once you’ve already seen them.

For those using iOS 4, the movies will now play nicely with your iPod or Pandora. It used to cut off whatever music you were listening to and play the movie. iOS 4 let’s us have the movie’s soundtrack and your music at the same time so we made it happen in version 1.1.

Remix Survival, Easy, Hard Modes

The biggest part of the update is the Remix Survival mode. This is an endless mode where the goal is to survive for as long as possible while virtually every obstacle and enemy you’ve encountered in the main game makes an appearance. We think it’s loads of fun.

For those who thought the game was too hard–and it was a hard game, we’ve implemented Easy mode. The original levels are now in the Hardcore mode. Your original saved game corresponds to the Hardcore mode.

Leaderboards, Achievements, and AGON

Achievements were in the original Propaganda Lander. We’ve moved all your achievements to the AGON system where the leaderboards also reside.

We’ve added the Remix Survival Mode as well as Easy/Hard modes. These modes also come with their own leaderboards for your competing pleasure.

iOS 4 Fast-App Switching

While we originally did not intend to have Fast-App Switching, we gave in. It was convenient to be able to reply to a text you get while playing Propaganda Lander or go to Pandora or check mail that you might have gotten or whatever. We thought it was a nice touch so we put it in. The game will pause when you switch out to another app and be ready to go once you come back.

PlayHaven

We have partnered with PlayHaven to cross-promote Propaganda Lander and other games on their network. You can access PlayHaven by touching the new “More Games” button on the lower left corner of the title screen. We like other developers.

Other Tidbits

There are smaller changes to Propaganda Lander as well. We probably couldn’t name them all even if we wanted to. There are little touches that we added that you’ll see throughout the game including generally improved performance across the board.

For those of you with older iDevices, the best way to get the best performance is to turn off the music and the sound effects. There will be a major improvement when you do that.

We’ve tried to eliminate as many memory issues as we can and we feel pretty confident that Propaganda Lander will run on all iPhone’s and iPod Touches without crashing often or needing you to reboot your phone–although it’s always good to do that just to clear out orphans in memory.

Good luck in Remix Survival and we are dying to compete with all of you on the leaderboards!

In more SDK 4.0 learnings, we came across a file size problem with Propaganda Lander in moving to SDK 4. The Unix Executable File became twice as big as it used to be under the 3.0 SDKs. There was no rhyme or reason for this that we could see.

If you are someone who cares about keeping your app’s file size under the 3G download limit, it is important to optimize as best as you can do get it under 20MB. A lot of games really don’t care which will be an annoyance to someone who wants to buy the game but has no WiFi service nearby. Other games just can’t be that small and then there’s nothing you can do about it.

We are pretty adamant about keeping Propaganda Lander under 20MB. Even with all our wondrous musical tunes, movies with voice overs, and pretty graphics we demand to have a game that can be downloaded from anywhere there is a 3G signal. After all, we are making a game for a mobile phone first and a portable music device second.

The reason why the executable file was twice as big under SDK 4 was because it defaults to compiling for iPad as well as iPhone. I see no reason to have both binaries when most games have specific versions for iPhone and iPad. You can fix this by checking Build Active Architecture Only in the project settings.

You should enable Dead Code Stripping as well–it usually is by default. There’s also Optimization Level which defaults to [-Os] for fastest, smallest and tends to be best.

In the quest to make Propaganda Lander run under iPhone SDK 4.0 and eventually utilize Game Center, I’ve run across some problems/solutions with multitasking. The most recent problem was with MPMoviePlayer. Propaganda Lander plays a movie on each planet plus a nice little video after you’ve beaten the game so movie playing had to work.

SDK 4.0 changes how the MPMoviePlayer works. I think it is now much better than it was before. You have more control over it. It will also, by default, mix with other audio as well. Right now, Propaganda Lander will kill your iPod if a movie plays. We didn’t particularly like that but, there was no choice in the matter. There is now! The iOS 4 version of Propaganda Lander will have this feature.

So, Apple has created an MPMoviePlayerViewController that you can use as a view to control the movie. MPMoviePlayerController still exists but is slightly different. In the past, creating an MPMoviePlayerController would just take over the device and play the movie. You now need to add your MPMoviePlayerController’s view to a UIView or UIWindow.

The MPMoviePlayerViewController will auto rotate if the device’s orientation changes. This was not ideal for Propaganda Lander as it only plays in one orientation: OrientationLandscapeRight. In order to get around that, we had to use the UIView from the MPMoviePlayerController and transform it accordingly.

Here is some code straight out of Propaganda Lander for movie player in iOS 4

You’ll need this for the degrees to radians conversion

#define degreesToRadian(x) (M_PI * (x) / 180.0)

This is the actual code:

MPMoviePlayerController * theMovie;
theMovie = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL: movieURL];
UIView * movieView = [theMovie view];

[movieView setFrame: CGRectMake(0, 0, 480, 320)];

CGAffineTransform landscapeTransform;
landscapeTransform = CGAffineTransformMakeRotation(degreesToRadian(90));
landscapeTransform = CGAffineTransformTranslate(landscapeTransform, 80, 80);

[movieView setTransform: landscapeTransform];
theMovie.scalingMode = MPMovieScalingModeAspectFit;
theMovie.fullscreen = TRUE;
theMovie.controlStyle = MPMovieControlStyleNone;
theMovie.shouldAutoplay = TRUE;

[[[UIApplication sharedApplication] keyWindow] addSubview: movieView];

If you would like to use the MPMoviePlayerViewController that has all the auto rotation features, it would look like this:

MPMoviePlayerViewController * movieView;
movieView = [[MPMoviePlayerViewController alloc] initWithContentURL: movieURL];

MPMoviePlayerController * theMovie = [movieView moviePlayer];
theMovie.scalingMode = MPMovieScalingModeAspectFit;
theMovie.fullscreen = TRUE;
theMovie.controlStyle = MPMovieControlStyleNone;
theMovie.shouldAutoplay = TRUE;

[[[UIApplication sharedApplication] keyWindow] addSubview: movieView.view]

When you the movie is done playing, you will want to remove it. You can do so by using the NSNotificationCenter to get a callback when the movie is done.

[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver: self
	selector: @selector(movieFinishedCallback:)
	name: MPMoviePlayerPlaybackDidFinishNotification
	object: theMovie];

When the movie is finished, it will call the movieFinishedCallback method which would look something like this:

- (void)movieFinishedCallback: (NSNotification*) notification;
{
	[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] removeObserver: self
		name:MPMoviePlayerPlaybackDidFinishNotification
		object: [notification object]];

	MPMoviePlayerController * theMovie = [notification object];

	[theMovie.view removeFromSuperview];
	[theMovie release];
}

This ONLY works in iOS 4 devices. If you also need to target iPhone OS 3.0 or 2.0, you will need to check for the OS and then have the former MPMoviePlayer code as well. Since Propaganda Lander still targets iPhone OS 3.0, we made this function to check for the OS.

std::string getOS()
{
	UIDevice * device = [UIDevice currentDevice];
	NSString * os = [device systemVersion];

	if([os isEqualToString:@"4.0"])
		return "4.0";
	if([os isEqualToString:@"3.0"])
		return "3.0";
	if([os isEqualToString:@"3.1"])
	        return "3.1";
	if([os isEqualToString:@"3.2"])
		return "3.2";
	if([os isEqualToString:@"3.1.2"])
		return "3.1.2";
	if([os isEqualToString:@"3.1.3"])
		return "3.1.3";

	return "";
}

And for a much more robust way of determining iOS version that can be compared as numbers:

float getOSf()
{
	UIDevice * device = [UIDevice currentDevice];
	NSString * os = [device systemVersion];

	float osAsFloat = [os floatValue];
	return osAsFloat;
}

There’s some C++ and Objective-C in there as you can see. I actually wanted to return numbers but, strings will do for now. You can just as well return NSString’s exclusively if you’d like. As you can also see, we don’t care about OS’s below 3.0. OS 3.2 is the iPad OS and should have no effect for iPhone development but, I left it in there anyway. I believe 3.2 uses the same MPMoviePlayer code as iOS 4.0.

So if your movie player suddenly stops working in iOS 4.0, this is why and this is how to fix it.

I installed iOS 4 on my iPhone 3GS the day it was available. It runs great and the new features are extremely useful. I’ve turned my 10 pages of apps into 3 pages using folders! I’ve been–as well as many others–waiting for multitasking for apps like Pandora and it’s finally here! I am now waiting for Rhapsody to provide an update with multitasking.

As is with every iPhone OS update, I need to install the new SDK to actually do any work. The update to iPhone SDK 4.0 wasn’t without a few hiccups! We are almost done with the rather hefty Propaganda Lander update and it will run just fine on iOS 4.

iPhone SDK 4.0 assumes every app that you develop will utilize multitasking. As of now, we don’t find much use for multitasking in our games. Propaganda Lander won’t have multitasking. When you close it, it will clear itself out of memory and won’t sit there hogging system resources.

While playing around with the new SDK, I have seen Propaganda Lander operate in the background. I’ve switched from Propaganda Lander to Safari and back. It’s kinda cool. Although, using any other resource intensive application will cause iOS to shut down Propaganda Lander anyway so it’s not particularly useful in that sense.

Implementing Multitasking

I had some difficulty trying to figure out how to opt out of multitasking! I followed the instructions Apple provides in their manual but, it just didn’t work–it had mostly to do with my shallow understanding of Xcode. Developers switching to iPhone SDK 4.0 will realize that their games will have an error upon exiting because it assumes the app is going to run in the background and you haven’t handled for it.

You can either handle for it using these two functions:

- (void)applicationDidEnterBackground:(UIApplication *)application
{
      [glView stopAnimation];
}

- (void)applicationWillEnterForeground:(UIApplication *)application
{
      [glView startAnimation];
}

They should reside in your AppDelegate and in this case we are stopping our animations when the app enters the background and restarts our drawing when the app enters the foreground. You are not allowed to make any GL calls while in the background.

That’s a quick way to implement background support although there are lot of other things that you need to account for depending on what your app is doing. Apple has a guide for that.

Opting Out

The other alternative is to simply opt out of running in the background. Apple has a guide for that as well but, it’s not exactly as they describe! Maybe I’m just not as Mac-savy–and I’m not–but, I followed their instructions and added the key/value pair to Propaganda Lander’s Info.plist and nothing happened.

With a little help from Nik–a Mac veteran if you will–we figured out that you can’t simply write YES as a string in the key/value pair. You need to right click in the value box and change the Value Type to a Boolean. This is seemingly obvious except I didn’t know you could do that. I’m from PC-land and we don’t use plists.

So if you are like me and can’t seem to figure out why Apple’s instructions aren’t working, this is what you need to do. It is also possible that I’m the only person developing for iPhone that didn’t know that in which case, hope you had a good laugh!