Apple is highlighting gaming once again in a new commercial dubbed “Unleash.” It is aimed at showing that Apple’s A11 Bionic chip in the iPhone X is ideal for gaming. And it highlighted Super Evil Megacorp’s Vainglory game to show off what the platform can do.
The film is aimed at showing non-mobile gamers and heavy mobile users alike that the iPhone is the right platform for mobile games thanks to the processing power of the A11.
Unleash highlights mobile multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game Vainglory, which is a nice marketing coup for Super Evil.
As soon as the commercial’s hero character dAv11d opens Vainglory on his phone, viewers see a blend of the real world and the world of Vainglory as familiar characters and imagery overtake the real buildings and streets around dAv11d.
The soundtrack is Movement by Oliver Tree, and it plays as dAv11d moves along the streets of Beijing, fighting off minions while multitasking real-life activities such as texting with friends and chatting with other gamers on YouTube live.
When iOS gamers select the Reza character in the game, they have the option to claim a dAv11d skin. Vainglory players can also watch the film natively within dAv11d’s “Watch Spotlight” feature throughout the duration of the campaign.
Apple and Super Evil Megacorp will also host an in-store event at the Union Square Apple store in San Francisco in August.
Tommy “TheRealKrul” Krul cofounder and chief technology officer at Super Evil Megacorp, said in a blog post that his team pushes performance because, in a fight, “every millisecond counts.”
“To celebrate the release of the gaming inspired film by Apple, showcasing Vainglory and the power that the iPhone X brings to gamers, we wanted to give you a little sneak peek at what goes on behind the curtain when our technology team designs, implements and optimizes a new feature like true line-of-sight fog of war for Apple’s A11 Bionic chip,” Krul said.
Vainglory is the first mobile game to ever provide a smooth real time line-of-sight fog of war effect on a mobile device. Previous generations of devices weren’t powerful enough to compute and display this visual effect.
Super Evil was aware that fog of war (where you can see a part of the battlefield) is traditionally calculated on a grid. But in games that use this method, you often see that the fog of war looks blocky.
Instead of using pixels, the Evil engine calculates fog of war using geometry. Each unit that provides vision starts out as a perfect circle.
“Then we iterate over all objects in the level that block vision, such as walls and brush, and we subtract their shape from the circle of vision of each unit,” Krul said. “By extending their geometry outwards, away from the unit for which we’re calculating its fog of war contribution, we’re left the exact geometric shape for the vision of that unit.”
If a lot of units and objects are blocking your character’s vision, this means a lot of calculations in every frame. And this is where the power of the A11 Bionic chip really shines, Krul said. The A11 is a multi-core chip meaning that instead of just being able to calculate one thing at a time, with some clever programming, the A11 is capable of calculating 6 operations all at once.
Vainglory uses the A11 chip to greatly speed up fog of war calculations on the iPhone X. The result is a higher frame rate.