Lot’s going on in OML-Land. TTL HD is out the door. TTL HD 1.1 is already in Apple’s queue (fixing a horrible crash for our international users). TTL 1.5 (iPhone) is in testing right now. On top of some R&D type stuff I’m messing around with so we can transition to our next project more smoothly.

So retina graphics are all the rage at the moment. If you were lucky to develop your game assets all in a vector-based format, supporting retina graphics was a bit easier. Luckily for us, Tilt to Live was all done in Adobe Illustrator. With a few tweaks to how sprites are rendered on the iPhone I had retina working in an afternoon.

Now, retina is all dandy until you get back onto the iPad.  If you are using the [UIScreen mainscreen].scale method to detect retina, be weary for iPad users. Things get a bit tricky on the iPad because:

  1. If you’re using the @2x trick, this doesn’t work on the iPad. This caused a few problems because some of our asset metadata relies on this as well so it caused a few minor headaches.
  2. Users can toggle the x2 mode mid-game.

At first I thought I could code to allow the iPad to load the retina graphics for a spiffy looking Tilt to Live. But the realization of #2 stopped me from pursuing it. Plus, with Tilt to Live HD on the app store now with even better graphics there really wasn’t a need to do it.

So if you plan on allowing iPad users to load retina graphics, it doesn’t exactly come as easy as it is on the iPhone 4. You may pretty much have to treat it in a similar fashion as a screen resolution change on a PC. This sometimes involves unloading textures, putting a loadscreen up, etc.

Next week I may go over some of things I came across implementing tilt controls with a gyroscope, which wasn’t exactly straightforward…