It's October. All new apps should have retina display.

[ozzyman500]

I'm tired of spending my hard earned money and having my software look like **** on my iPhone 4. I see Gameloft updating a lot of their apps but they are doing a half assed job and only updating the graphics and not the whole game. GT Racing looks fabulous but the text looks horrible. I just bought the new Cut the Rope game and it's hideous looking! I know a lot of the older apps probably won't get updated but c'mon now it's been out for 4 months. You don't need to have an iPhone anymore just get a new iPod touch and use that for developing. It's less expensive. I don't see why dev's aren't using this great new technology that looks absolutely stunning.

/end rant.

 

[Mitchelino]

Hideous? What hideous apps are you talking about? I've seen some pretty good looking apps on my non-retina display. Can't say I have any that look hideous.

If you really want your apps to have support for retina display, then contact the developers/support for the apps. Ranting on here wont get the message to them.

I sort of see where you're coming from, though, as I wish all my apps were multitasking enabled. Especially my apps from Electronic Arts; they really suck at updating apps to take advantage of updates to iOS.

I am noticing that more apps are slowly being updated for multitasking and retina display. But there will always be those apps that don't get updated; it all depends on the stance of the company/developer.

 

[egaal]

I'm tired of spending my hard earned money and having my software look like **** on my iPhone 4. I see Gameloft updating a lot of their apps but they are doing a half assed job and only updating the graphics and not the whole game. GT Racing looks fabulous but the text looks horrible. I just bought the new Cut the Rope game and it's hideous looking! I know a lot of the older apps probably won't get updated but c'mon now it's been out for 4 months. You don't need to have an iPhone anymore just get a new iPod touch and use that for developing. It's less expensive. I don't see why dev's aren't using this great new technology that looks absolutely stunning.

/end rant.

Before going on such a rant, think about how much you spent on an app. 99 cents? $1.99? Probably less than what you spend on a cup of coffee or a pack of gum. How many hours of work will that pay for? Let's assume the company will need to use both at least one developer's and one graphic artist's time to make changes.

Just saying, try to be a little bit more patient and understanding. And assume that unless app prices go up instead of continuing their race to the bottom, some changes are just not economical for developers and some will just take more time to get to it.

Having said that, as a new developer to the scene, we'll be coming out with a retina display ready game with high rez text/graphics, however I can understand why some don't go back to make changes to already existing games.

 

[chrono1081]

Graphics take a LOT of work and time to upgrade, and unless the developer is also a good artist, its a lot of money to update as well.

Getting retina display for a game out in anything less than 6 months is impressive. Not only do you have to design and test the graphics from the ground up, but you also have to test extensively for performance because updated graphics and higher resolutions are a lot more processor intensive.

There is also the fact that a lot of devs try and keep their apps under the 20MB limit so users can download them over the cellular networks. Good luck doing that with the retina display quality graphics.

I have hundreds of graphics for a game i am working on and its a daily struggle to balance between retina display quality and file size and performance.

There is a lot of work that goes into something like this.

 

[lucifiel]

Fook rationality! I want my pretty graphics and I want them now! I don't care if you devs have made really logical argument as to why this is by necessity a slow process, I still think that you must all just be STUPID!

GIVE ME MY PRETTY GRAPHICS. I don't want better optimisations, or better gameplay, or removal of bugs, I JUST WANT SHINY GRAPHICS!

anyhoos...

Thanks for the excellent explanation there guys, I do appreciate the work you do

 

[ozzyman500]

Before going on such a rant, think about how much you spent on an app. 99 cents? $1.99? Probably less than what you spend on a cup of coffee or a pack of gum. How many hours of work will that pay for? Let's assume the company will need to use both at least one developer's and one graphic artist's time to make changes.

Yes, but how long has a game like Angry Birds been at the top? I think it sold around a million copies for $.99. I've talked about Cut the Rope have ****** graphics. If you can't buy a new iPod touch and test on that with the success of Angry Birds, then I will stop supporting Chillingo.

 

[vettori]

I agree that new released apps has to fully support Retina display, there are no excuses to not support it for new apps. The designers simply have to draw at double the resolution and produce two images, one at full res, the other at half res. For example for my Group Email! app that runs native on the iPad with the next upgrade I designed graphics at double resolution even if the iPad does not have (yet) a retina display. If the next iPad will have a double resolution display I'll be ready to support it in no time.

Other thing is upgrade existing apps, especially if graphics has been designed at the lower resolution and so supporting retina requires to redo the graphics elements.

 

[chrono1081]

Yes, but how long has a game like Angry Birds been at the top? I think it sold around a million copies for $.99. I've talked about Cut the Rope have ****** graphics. If you can't buy a new iPod touch and test on that with the success of Angry Birds, then I will stop supporting Chillingo.

You make no sense. These games were in development long before apple announced the retina display. games aren't something you can make in a day. Just because something was released recently doesn't mean it was developed recently. Once you develop something, especially a game there is months of testing that goes along with it.

 

[chrono1081]

I agree that new released apps has to fully support Retina display, there are no excuses to not support it for new apps. The designers simply have to draw at double the resolution and produce two images, one at full res, the other at half res.

It is not even close to being that simple. For newly released apps, they probably wont have retina display support because they were made before the retina display was announced and have been being tested. The developer needs to make money so they have to release the app to pay for the future upgrades.

As for drawing at double resolution and downsizing that rarely works. If you have detailed artwork scaling down generally ends up looking bad and a complete rework is needed. If your game is 3d that wont work at all. You would need to retexture everything since not only will you probably be after higher resolution textures, but you will have to redo all of those textures from scratch to support the higher resolution.

 

[vettori]

^^^

I can't say for 3d because I have no experience but for 2d games like the OP's cited "Cut the Rope" (very nice game by the way) that usually are made with multiple backgrounds and sequences of images for animations I'm pretty sure that working with vector graphics and scaling to different resolutions you can get good results. And Apple has always told us to design for higher resolution when possible and later scale.

Moreover if I had to develop a game now I'll probably choose to have the better graphics on newest devices at the cost of having some imperfections on older devices.

Who knows when they developed the game, it can also be an older game (developed before iPhone4) and released now for marketing decisions, and since the game is top 1, it was a good decision

 

[chrono1081]

I too love Cut the rope. Genius idea.

Vector graphics would work well for a lot of people and is a great way to get scalable artwork. unfortunately for me my art looks like water colors or oil paintings which aren't so scalable :/ They are usually made in Corel Painter at a high resolution. the backgrounds can be scaled usually but objects which are a higher detail cannot without taking a hit :/