Firemint: 'iPhone 3G S compass has exciting potential'

The compass in the new iPhone 3G S might not seem like the most startling innovation for gaming, but Firemint CEO Rob Murray disagrees.

"Everyone at Firemint is very excited about the faster 3G S iPhone with new features," he says.

"The compass has some exciting potential also. If it is sensitive and responsive enough then we would have a whole new axis of rotational input to our games. That could be a significant boon to game controls."

Firemint released its hotly-tipped iPhone game Real Racing yesterday before the WWDC keynote presentation. Could it benefit from the more powerful iPhone 3G S hardware?

"We have been working with OpenGL ES 2 reference hardware for a while and have a working prototype of Real Racing running on it, but until now we haven't had a viable platform to publish on," says Murray.

That'll be a yes then.

One thing we've been asking developers is how they'll tackle the challenge of supporting the new hardware features in the iPhone 3G S, while also catering to existing iPhones. Murray accepts that there will be choices to make.

"If we choose to use those features then we have to deal with the divergence that they could introduce, beyond just the performance gap," he says.

"It is possible to do some really interesting lighting and rendering effects with the shaders that will be available, but some of these effects may impact the asset processing pipeline and make it difficult to deliver one reference build that targets both OpenGL 1.0 and 2.0 optimally."

A big problem? Not according to Murray.

"This level of fragmentation is pretty minor and kind of an exciting problem to have compared to having to build a game that runs across: C++ / OpenGL hardware acceleration, C++ with a software engine, Java 3D with JSR-184, Java 3D with Mascot Capsule, and then all the inevitable 2D versions that we have been tackling on non-iPhone mobiles for so long."

Quite so. This is an enduring theme from the developers we've talked to today: they're used to nightmarish handset fragmentation issues in the mobile gaming world, so Apple debuting a new iPhone that'll quickly be bought by several million people isn't giving them headaches by comparison.

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