Support for newly announced iPad Pro, Apple Pencil and iPhone 6S range

[center]iPad Pro[/center]
[center]http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/09/apple-live-blog-apple-tv-ipad-pro-new-iphones.html

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More power, increased battery life, bigger size and many other nice features. I think it would be a great idea if we could also use Apple pencil to move around and other controls. Four speakers are going to be interesting as well

Touch ID for purchases would be handy


[center][b]iPhone 6S range[/b][/center]

Metal, taptic engine and 3D touch

Final Note/Update: I was pumping this out live so things may be a little mumbo-jumbo

Needs more iPad mini

Would it even need support? Does it use the same OS as regular ipads?

Yes but they will need to take advantage of metal being added to the iPad Pro and the new specs, maybe make some adjustments for an iPad Pro screen. Not to mention they will need support for the apple pencil

I don’t exactly know what they would be supporting. To my understanding, the pencil is just a stylist that can detect pressure.

It’s iOS it will already work

As long as there is no exotic drivers that crash on ROBLOX, it should work 100% fine as long as the iOS does not update completely like from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10.

I don’t exactly know what they would be supporting. To my understanding, the pencil is just a stylist that can detect pressure.[/quote]Think of the possibilities of tapping with your Apple Pencil in locations where you want to go (similar to the old click-n-move) but with pressure sensing. It could be interesting

There’s going to be new API and more features available to devs with the iPad Pro. Not to mention some optimizations/changes for the larger screen other wise it will act like using an iPhone app on iPad :frowning:

I don’t exactly know what they would be supporting. To my understanding, the pencil is just a stylist that can detect pressure.[/quote]Think of the possibilities of tapping with your Apple Pencil in locations where you want to go (similar to the old click-n-move) but with pressure sensing. It could be interesting
[/quote]

I don’t see how that would be any different than just tapping with your finger. It just seems like more work for nothing.

I don’t exactly know what they would be supporting. To my understanding, the pencil is just a stylist that can detect pressure.[/quote]Think of the possibilities of tapping with your Apple Pencil in locations where you want to go (similar to the old click-n-move) but with pressure sensing. It could be interesting
[/quote]

I don’t see how that would be any different than just tapping with your finger. It just seems like more work for nothing.[/quote]
If I press deep my character would walk at full speed but if I only pressed lightly I could move at a slower rate (like when moving the joystick on mobile) and GUI navigation. I can imagine a hefty amount of people are going to be using the Apple Pencil with the iPad Pro

I don’t exactly know what they would be supporting. To my understanding, the pencil is just a stylist that can detect pressure.[/quote]Think of the possibilities of tapping with your Apple Pencil in locations where you want to go (similar to the old click-n-move) but with pressure sensing. It could be interesting
[/quote]

I don’t see how that would be any different than just tapping with your finger. It just seems like more work for nothing.[/quote]
If I press deep my character would walk at full speed but if I only pressed lightly I could move at a slower rate (like when moving the joystick on mobile) and GUI navigation. I can imagine a hefty amount of people are going to be using the Apple Pencil with the iPad Pro[/quote]

Yeah, that’s just doesn’t sound needed. If anything, ROBLOX should support pressure-sensitive screens; not the Apple Pencil. This will allow a larger range of devices, not just apple exclusive ones. There’s a few android devices out there that can detect pressure as well as some touchscreen computers.

I’m an apple fan and I don’t understand why people would want an iPad the size of a 13" fully working computer.

[quote]
Yes but they will need to take advantage of metal being added to the iPad Pro [/quote]

What? :?

[quote]
Yes but they will need to take advantage of metal being added to the iPad Pro [/quote]

What? :?[/quote]
I think Metal is Apple’s graphics card?

[quote] [quote=“anon80475429” post=198682]
Yes but they will need to take advantage of metal being added to the iPad Pro [/quote]

What? :?[/quote]
I think Metal is Apple’s graphics card?[/quote]

Metal is Apples super efficient rendering system. It’s an implementation of OpenGL and some other rendering libraries. The system has been on iOS and OS X for a while now…

ROBLOX isn’t going to bother with Metal: http://developer.roblox.com/forum/feature-requests/15808

“super-efficient” is probably just advertising propoganda because zeuxcg said that they would implement it if it made a big difference, but they haven’t so that must mean it doesn’t make a big difference which means it isn’t “super efficient” (at least, this is the case on “most devices”)

[quote] [quote=“triston220” post=198788][quote=“anon80475429” post=198682]
Yes but they will need to take advantage of metal being added to the iPad Pro [/quote]

What? :?[/quote]
I think Metal is Apple’s graphics card?[/quote]

Metal is Apples super efficient rendering system. It’s an implementation of OpenGL and some other rendering libraries. The system has been on iOS and OS X for a while now…[/quote]
The iPad Pro has an A9X chip so ROBLOX are gonna want to squeeze as much as they can out of it.

Also ditch the apple pencil idea, I’ve realised that’s not really a good idea and agree with tiger

1 Like

I’m new and I’m not on the Game team so I don’t know the particulars of our engine, but I’ve worked on several multi-platform games and I believe I can shed some light on things.

When you write a cross platform game you write it as generically as possible so it can work on all the platforms you are going to support and you connect it to each platform at as low a level as you can to keep that platform specific code to a minimum. DOOM for example rendered each of it’s frames into memory using no system libraries whatsoever, so the platform specific code only had to copy/translate that frame image to the video display. That’s why DOOM could be translated relatively easily to just about anything that could run C and had a video display, even a 2005 iPod Nano. Most multi-platform games follow this pattern, or they use frameworks which already run on multiple platforms, like Unity, but that introduces many other issues and limits what platforms you can expand to.

So you have a generic engine that does everything you need it to do. Now if you want to take advantage of some platform specific libraries you’re going to be spending valuable engineering resources to re-implement things in a platform specific way to the benefit of only those users who use that platform. This is a hard and potentially a huge expense for games that are built and then shipped and never updated again. But Roblox is under constant development so having multiple implementations would require any changes or additions being done in the generic engine AND in any platform specific code, doubling the engineering cost and the chance of bugs. Also when the platform changes it’s libraries, or break things, we’d have to spend more resources fixing that.

In short: Any platform specific code that gets added to the engine must be VERY well justified because it can add a lot of overhead to future engine development.

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On Metal in detail:
http://developer.roblox.com/forum/feature-requests/15808#169920

We’ll go Metal when iOS devices that support it are a significant percentage (80%+, I guess…). Right now - still - more than half of the devices we run on don’t support it so it’s not worth spending the time on.

Thanks guys. :slight_smile: