Hey guys,

For those who haven't been following WWDC, Apple just announced that the iPhone 3GS will support OpenGL|ES 2.0. I was wondering how this would affect your development process.

Does anyone know if this change will work on older devices that upgrade to the new OS (is this a software or hardware change?). If it's a hardware change, how would you go about supporting ES 1.1 and ES 2.0? Are you forced to choose one or the other? If so, would you develop the game twice, one for the 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices that don't support ES 2.0, and one for the million or so tech geeks who need the newest device ASAP?

Anyway, just wanted to open this up for discussion. So, discuss!

~Achi

I think it depends heavily on how your dev cycle looks. If I were to start developing a new product today, I'd gear it towards the new chipset. By the time I hit market, the 3GS' tech will be ubiquitous. This here is a pretty slow developer, so that'd be my strategy. For products with cycles shorter than, say, 9 months, leaving the slowPod behind would be teh fail.

I wonder if we'll be able to program a game for ES 1.1 and have it work on a device that supports ES 2.0. I don't know much about OpenGL, I'll be starting to learn it after I launch a few Cocoa Touch applications. My initial jump for joy is slowly turning to a frown.

Thanks for the reply!

~Achi

I assume the 3GS has a 1.1 mode to support older apps as 2.0 doesn't support the fixed-function pipeline. If the 3GS didn't support 1.1 then 20-30K apps wouldn't work. That'd be silly. Maybe it has both a 1.1 chip and a 2.0 chip? Or maybe its chip just supports both. /shrug

I was already planning on graphics upgrades to my current and future projects for when they ran on a 3GS (to take advantage of the faster processor/more memory). Two rendering pipelines for two devices isn't a *huge* undertaking once you've written one.

If you're attending WWDC, come to Wednesday's GL sessions, where these topics will be discussed in detail.

And, for those of you who have access to 3.0 developer documentation, these questions are also answered in the new OpenGL ES Programming Guide for iPhone.

Just noticed there's a new guide on the Dev Center: "Open GL ES 2.0 Programming Guide" that you can find under the 3.0 Readiness Checklist. The Dev Center is having issues right now with people trying to get the 3.0 GM, so you might have to wait a bit to get a link.

I believe 3.0 implementation details are still under NDA so I can't go into specifics, but 1.1 should just work without changes on the 3GS.

OGL ES 2.0 was a nice surprise today. Can't wait to see what the 3GS can do in a couple weeks.