Slashdot Mirror
Game-development on Compaq iPaq
kilaasi writes "Some hard-core game-developers from Finland is making super-optimized games for the iPaq and similar devices, tweaking and tuning every bit of piece there is. These are old Commodore and Amiga-programmers that know the virtues of small-is-beautifull."
It's great that they're doing this - it will certainly allow for some cool games in the future, but not quite yet... the iPaq has a hardware "feature" that prevents programs from detecting simultaneous usage of more than one button. Nothing sucks more than having to stop moving so you can shoot or jump. To counter this, developers have built "virtual buttons" that appear on the touch screen, but this takes up alot of the already limited screen realty. Plues, its hard to get used to not having the underappreciated tactile feedback of physical buttons.
i'm using ibm via voice to control the screen on a bluetooth enabled pocket pc 2002 with 128 mb sd card, connecting to a ericsson t68 with bluetooth and using gprs. the 64k colors look great, the sound is stellar. most folks here trash microsoft no matter what they do, but the pocket pc 2002 os is amazing so is the compaq hardware. i tip my hat to ms on this, nicely done.
Wow, the good ol' days. I was late, I didn't start getting around to the demoscene until Second Reality came out at Assembly'94. Then I was hooked. There were many hoaxes of "Third Reality" coming out at the next big demoparty, as I recall.
A lot of the old FC crew created a company called "Remedy" which creates the 3dmark benchmarks and recently released the game Max Payne. Purple Motion even did the music for part of 3dmark2001.
A few people on an IRC channel I used to frequent just found a 64k intro from The Party 2000. They said "wow, when did people do this?" When I started telling them about the good ol days of MS-DOS and the demos and intros (and 4k intros!) of that time, they all turned their noses and said "EWWW DOS was NEVER good for ANYTHING! Yuck!"
Of course, back then, the amount of polygons you could fit on a torus was the big challenge. It was what originally got me into programming. I feel so old now.
Of course now, it's so easy to create jaw dropping images without optimized code, so it's nice to see that there is something to really test your skills on like the iPaq. I miss seeing elegant code.
How big was Final Fantasy VI? 32Mbits = 4 MB if I recall correctly. How big was Mario 64, one of the most impressive 3D worlds at the time? 16MB? A playable game, if designed correctly (and on the right hardware), can be significantly smaller than 50MB.
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
I'm curious to know why this is such a lost art. Could it be due to the fact that most engines are proprietary code? Did this lead to a state where a limited number of people have access to the code? Even fewer that would want to muck with 'legacy' code in the engine? What about publishing this in a book? I've read "The Black Art of Game Programming" which I found informative; Does this book not dive into the secrets? What are the secrets? It occurs to me that maybe these lost arts come from optimizing solutions to specific hardware platforms. Could these skills be lost because of the hardware dependencies, where as the evolution of software engineering has gravitated toward abstractions such as portability and a more OOP structure? If the knowledge of the art were important or interesting enough to distribute, where can we find it documented?
Don't mind me. This was a stream of consciousness ramble.
Although I'd like to rejoice at this news, I fear it won't help us much. With M$ pouring resources into XP and Xbox, I fear that CE (with its very reasonable liscencing terms) will become yet another orphaned child from Redmond.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I think there are a lot of gamers out there with Ipaqs who don't want extraneous 3-D graphics and action games. What is wrong with games that would be more suited to the platform. Like strategy (No, RTS is not real strategy) or RPGS?
r /FreeCiv/FreeCivScreenshots.html
http://members.fortunecity.com/broadsword/Compute
Somebody started working on a freeciv port, but I think it has been abandoned. Thats too bad. I can't think of many games more suited to the Ipaq than Civ.
Anyhow.. I just think all this Ipaq gaming development is going in the wrong direction. Someone should port dos to this thing (with VGA support) then we could play all kinds of good non 3d games at 320x200.
The question is how much impact will this have on the glitz-greedy public? They don't all use iPaqs, and in this day and age games are sold on the basis of glitz- good gameplay is a bonus, not a requirement.
What's in a Sig?