The Oolong Engine

Tonight David Clement will be presenting his experience with the Oolong game engine, a high performance game engine optimized for 3d graphics on the iPhone. RSVP here, there are still a few spots available

The Oolong engine is a powerful open source 3D engine that supports sophisticated 3d animation, skinned characters and more. If you are considering using 3D rendering & animation in your iPhone application then you should take a look at Oolong. This presentation is designed to give both 3D artists and developers a quick tour of Oolong, its capabilities and short comings so you can make the right choice for your application.

Presentation Outline
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Introducing the Oolong Engine
Oolong in the 3D asset life cycle.
A brief introduction to the Bullet physics engine.
Different ways of using Oolong in your application.
What Oolong is ideal suited for
When not to use Oolong
A quick look at the code (time permitting)

iPhone Memory Management

Yesterday we witnessed yet another excellent presentation at the weekly drop-in sessions of our Vancouver iPhone developer meetup, organized at Wavefront.

Hendrik Presenting Profiling Instruments

Hendrik Kueck presented iPhone memory management basics and a few tricks. Hendrik is the creator of the blockbuster iPhone application ColorSplash , and of the full featured image manipulation application for iPhone Juxtaposer.

Last night’s presentation looked at memory issues on the iPhone, many of which Hendrik found about the hard way. His iPhone applications are performing image processing using intensive memory consuming algorithms.

On the iPhone, like on any other mobile device, programmers have to deal with the fact that the physical memory resources are limited compared with a desktop computer. Hendrik also talked about reference counting, autorelease pools, and specific issues related to loading resource file components and views. Other topics included profiling memory usage and leaks with Apple’s instruments, the use of the static analyzer Clang, tips for allocating a large amount of memory, handling memory warnings, and the use of memory mapped files.

Hendrik posted the full presentation here.

Wavefront Drop-in Networking and GameKit P2P

Last night’s Vancouver iPhone developer’s drop-in, organized at Wavefront, proved to be a huge success with more people showing up than the space could fit.

Aaron Hilton presenting

Aaron Hilton did an excellent job presenting different networking solutions available on the iPhone. We looked at communication using HTTP GET for small amounts of data and at  NSURLConnection for larger data chunks. Aaron also presented ways to use GameKit, which takes care of all the network handshaking and connection UI, to allow  developers to focus on building their application. iPhone also supports Bonjour, a standard protocol that allows quick network resource discovery and communication. The presentation slideshow is available here.

After the presentation most attendants continued to our, now usual, watering spot at the Elephant and Castle pub nearby on Burard.

I can’t help but recommend these drop-in meetings. It is an excellent environment to learn new things about iPhone development, and a great place to network and make friends.