S3 Games Dev Blog

Sector3 originally worked with Anthony Parkes on his original iPhone hit - PileUp and we are happy to announce that we have brought his fun and addictive game to the Mac and PC with the release of PileUp v1.0 for desktop.

Pile Up is a simple, yet highly addictive game that puts you in control of a traffic intersection. In this fast-paced, strategy game, your job is simple. Let the cars know when it’s safe to enter the intersection to get to their exit. Tell the cars to go at the wrong time and it’s game over!!

The full version of PileUp ships with three unique and challenging levels, and there is a demo available to try out before purchase that includes one level.

PileUp, along with Elevens on the Desktop have been priced at only $4.95 and are part of our initiative to deliver fun and addictive games at low prices for all to enjoy!

… and finally fixes any outstanding crash/freeze issues I included when 1.4 was initially released.

An explanation to the introdiuction of crashes in the 1.4 release, though not trying to make excuses, is that developing for the iPhone and iPod touch and ensuring compatibility across everyone’s devices is by no means a simple task.

You would naturally assume that if it works ok on one persons device it would work on all “same” devices, but there are many factors that usually cause that not to be the case. Not rebooting your device often enough is a known issue that causes apps to run out of memory and crash. Having every feature on your device turned on (bluetooth, corelocation, push etc…) is also known to cause havoc between different devices. Let’s not even get into the jailbroken versus not issues.

To counter this, I have a bunch of devices I test all of our games on (Original iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, Touch v2) plus I have a bunch of testers with same or differing devices.

At the end of the day all I can do is ensure that my games work on the devices I have to test with (and those of my testers), and then hope that all works well for the masses.

In the case of the 1.4 release of Elevens, to this day, I still cannot reproduce the crash bugs on my devices I have on my desk, and what’s more, though I never doubt a customer when they tell me they have a problem, since 1.4 has come out, there have been over 1500 new high scores added to the high scores list submitted from devices that are running 1.4 and above, so clearly, the bug effects some and not others.

So, the good news is that with the help of a few patient customers that did suffer from the crash bugs, I have managed to track down the issues (over a few releases) and am confident that no one else should suffer from them once they upgrade to 1.4.5

For those customers that reported crashes as part of their reviews of the App, if the crashes have been fixed for you, please follow up your reviews with new ones. I feel that people should review the good as well as the bad.

… though I set myself a task of catching up on a bunch of work (game updates and the like), I find my mind drifting and instead I have been playing with different bits of technology (like networking code) and reading blogs and websites about things that interest me… mainly gadget and technology related things.

I keep thinking about starting my own non-business related blog, something personal or purely interest related, but I can never think of any topics that I really want to write about, let alone things that others would really want to read.

I could just start a blog that regurgitates news and info from other blogs, like some do, but whats the point in that? It’s not original, and because I live down-under (Slang for Australia), we generally get the latest news during our sleep time, so by the time we wake up, reporting late news back to the world is not really a compelling idea.

So I sit here, doing tid bits of work, day dreaming of *stuff* and basically wasting my day away. It doesn’t even count as down-time as I am burning as many brain cells as I usually do coding like a maniac… just burning them on non-productive thoughts!

I tried watching some movies, but nothing was gripping me… so all that was left for me to do was put these thouhts down here and share them with anyone that might read this blog…

… IS anyone reading this blog?

I found this article this morning while catching up on some of my geek tech news, and thought it was funny and that I should share it! Once again people with too much time on their hands, but definitely a high production value video. What do you think? Would you buy an ePad over an iPad? I am thinking I might, just for giggles!