Recorded a little video for posterity today to show how Archaos is running on an iPad 1 – as you can see, it’s very smooth and playable. There are still some optimisations I could make to the clipping code, but even with the current fairly inoptimal method of clipping, large boards such as 50×50 are perfectly playable on an original iPad.

I’ve done an awful lot in the last week or so on Archaos. Primarily the focus has been on optimisation, as it quickly became apparent that as3isolib was simply not fast enough for the job at hand. This led me to explore the possibility of using Starling, a fantastic 2D-on-the-GPU framework, which tries to remain true to the standard AS3 display list as much as possible.

This of course meant I had to rewrite my entire render stack from the ground up. Bummer.

After a few days of building and tinkering with my own Starling-powered custom and very lightweight isometric rendering engine, the frame rates began to climb and climb. Today, after reading up on it a bit more, I’ve managed to get the game pretty speedy.

A whole lotta dragons

Above is a 200×200 board (that’s 40,000 squares) with approximately 20,000 animated, interactive golden dragons nodding away at just under 5 frames per second on my (admittedly pretty powerful) PC. Now this kind of test is pretty unrealistic, but it demonstrates what the engine is now capable of pretty well.

I’ve included further optimisations such as clipping (items off-screen are not drawn, which speeds things up considerably) and making use of a single ‘Texture Atlas’ for all of the units (basically a sprite sheet – gives a huge performance boost).

I’ve deployed some tests to my iPad 1 and my iPhone 4S and they’re running pretty nicely on both (my iPad is pretty much past it now but still churns the game out at a good 30-40fps) which makes me very happy indeed – especially in comparison to earlier last week when I deployed the as3isolib version to my iPhone and it ran at about 2fps!

I’ve also added other little visual touches and niceties (such as units jumping/flying between tiles rather than just sliding across) and have plans to add some really fun little things to make the whole experience of wizards and creatures fighting with one another all the more satisfying.

Just implemented wizard colours and customisation (currently in the form of hats/hair-dos) and thought I’d share a test! Groovy!

All the colours! (Click for larger image)

Earlier on I got wind of news that very nearly made my heart stop.

OK it's official! I am working on a sequel/remake to my classic ZX Spectrum game 'Chaos' – for iOS, PC, Mac – maybe more.

— Julian Gollop (@julian_gollop) November 2, 2012

Yes, Julian Gollop – creator of the original Chaos, of the original X-Com, and of many other seminal classics, has begun work on his own remake of Chaos using Unity 3D to initially target PC, Mac and iOS. He also stated:

@MullinsDaRapper I want to keep combat/movement very close to the original, with some tweeks.

— Julian Gollop (@julian_gollop) November 2, 2012

…which bodes well for it sticking to the original winning formula.

Development on the game has only just begun, and Julian is currently looking for good artists. He has estimated that the game will take around a year to finish, so we’ll all have to be patient.

I guess the recent massive success of XCOM: Enemy Unknown has brought Gollop back to the forefront and given him the motivation needed to revisit what has to be in my (and many other people’s) opinion one of the greatest games of all time.

Julian, if you read this, I wish you all the very best with your remake. Chaos has been crying out to be remade for a modern market, and a market that’s now clearly in the right place to readily accept a multi-platform turn-based strategy title such as this.

What however does this mean for Archaos? Surely with this title coming out, it makes Archaos obsolete and possibly in danger of legal action as it will directly compete with Julian’s version on the same platforms?

@lewster32 I have no problem with it, don't worry.

— Julian Gollop (@julian_gollop) November 2, 2012

Sometimes it really is worth meeting your heroes.