wildboar

I dont actually use apple tools at all. I am using a crossplatform API called marmalade which lets me code in C++
I am not sure what kind of profiling tools I can use with it as I cant even use gdebugger with it.

Hmm so I implemented a small test for my mobile game engine. I knew that it ipad could not handle dynamic shadowmapping of the entire scene so I generate a 768x768 shadowmap at the start of the frame and leave it there, this is just done on the first frame and repeated on scene changes. It works pretty well producing very nice shadows which have nice quality with retina resolution and MSAA. But doing so my game performance drops from 60fps to 30-40fps depending how many mesh instances I have in the scene (I use frustum culling). I just cant understand why when having 5 extra meshes in the scene the frame rate drops so drasticly, I mean I am just sampling a static shadowmap once for each pixel.

How does infinity blade dungeons manage to have all these nice screen space effects combined with dynamic shadow mapping for characters. Is there some trick to this?

int * a, * b;
there ya go, some basic pointers

Try make a game with opengl. If you can follow the tutorials then your learning at right speed

I suggest you read http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/fix-your-timestep/
Will answer a lot of your questions

I suggest real time rendering which would explain all your questions.
graphics shaders: theory and practise is also a good book.
the official glsl book as well.

I would also suggest to start learning 4.0 or 4.1 opengl/shaders since its most recent.
And its actually more convinient for the programmer as well.

I dont understand, whats the point of this thumbs down, thumbs up thing,
its ruining gamedev.net.

It seems random newbies just pointlessly down thumbing peoples posts,
this irritates people and causes people to stop wanting to help people or post
because of the subconscious thought of their post being down thumbed.

This feature should be removed from gamedev.net, it doesn't really add anything.
At least make the down rating system private like how it was before.
The whole system needs a major rework.

You sure you added the include path for both release and debug builds?

What kind of hardware are you running on?
Sounds like there could be some kind of bottleneck in the code.

Rendering is done by the GPU, since your logic and rendering is on one thread you cant really
do much to slow just the rendering down.

Profile your code and make sure you dont have any potential code that causes slow downs.

Most common is hex editing the exe file which can still leave checksums happy.
You can remove gameguard protection for example in some MMORPG clients using this.
To combat this you can pack your exe with something like aspack with a custom encryption.

You can also decompile the exe file into C but it would look very strange because all the symbols are missing.

Another common form of hacking is dll injection which can modify the way your game works.
Speed hacks, teleport hacks and all that is possible.

If its an online game then a hacker can mess up your packets by capturing them and replaying them
with modified values. Also man in the middle attacks.

For offline games biggest problem is that a user can modify his own computer memory and change any value.
Then again if its an offline game then does it really matter? I mean they bought the game so they have the right to modify it if they wish to
ruin their gameplay. In an online game you can make sure that your important variables are server sided.

I play certain single player games with a speed hack because I find it boring to constantly travel from place to place at snails pace.

How about TSSAO?
GPU PRO 2
Seems its the current best adaptation of this technique
I think Crysis 2 uses something similar