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Mobile Gaming with BREW
KeelSpawn writes "For the most of us who are bored with playing that game called "Snake" -- chasing a black dot with a string of lines -- that likely came standard with your cell phone, here's some interesting news. Try a round of golf instead, or a combat game called "Gladiator." Soon, even the ever popular "Dungeons & Dragons". All those will be playable through cellphones, wirelessly."
pocket pool?
Will the world's most ported game be ported to the cellphone? I can't imagine a cellphone ascention. And since you'd only have the numberpad, I guess it would be hard to actually do anyhting except walk around the dungeon.
., Call), and you could just go up and down selecting inventory.
I guess you could use one of the keys as an option key to allow you to scroll thru the commands(apply, . , close, tAkeitalloff,
Just a thought
Begin Secret Code:
JHFG_#@9599f999f9amAMANN)@Ml)28fl2KKF03
The previous has been a secret message to my comrades.
This is very true. BREW is used on very few phones, and PalmOS is proliferating. Not to mention proprietary OSs from Motrola, Nokia, etc.
Sony could give us a port of Everquest ... :)
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
Games on cell phones! I truly have no need of a life whatsover now. Of course not having a life would leave me no reason for a cell phone. Then again most people with cell phones... Hmm. I have no life and want to be able to play even the most mind numbing, ugly ass games wherever I go. Think I'll get me a PDA... Yeah, thats worth $250...
Shift happens. Fire it up.
I think they're available on the NTT DoCoMo phones, there's information at http://www.nttdocomo.com
One of the more popular games here in Japan is called samurai romanesque from Dwango. check it out if you want to have a taste of thing to come:
o ad.html
http://www.dwango.com/press/pr008.htm
Also if you would like to develop java applications check out Zentek's i-jade emulators:
http://www.zentek.com/i-JADE/en/downl
Symbian has wider acceptance in the marketplace, but I don't think it has a toehold yet. Palm OS is on a few models of cell phones. BREW is certainly ubiquitous, but I would heartily admit that it is obsolete and will soon be overtaken by systems targeted at this application.
Quoth the article: "Although users could care less about which computer languages power their cell phone games, analysts are watching for technologies such as BREW to spawn increasingly sophisticated diversions as the wireless infrastructure becomes more robust."
"Could care less"? And this is on CNN's website? For shame, for shame.
Dungeons and Dragons(and other games) billed by the minute?(as most WAP/web-browsing is)
(runs off to go buy wireless provider stock)
:-)
Mobile whatever is just plain bad. It's best to sit in a stationary position and pretend that you don't work for a company that thinks entry-level programmers should be confined to the header files.
I worked at such a company, and now I'm insane.
I tried to #include "beer.h", and it #included "coconut-strawberry-ring-dings.h"
Now I have an attorney.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Soon, even the ever popular "Dungeons & Dragons"
I thought the lack of Neverwinter builder tools for Linux and Mac was odd, but obviously attention is being focused on a hush hush port of Neverwinter to the cellphone. All joking aside, couldn't you see this happening at a board meeting?
"So, you want to allocate resources to these non windows thingamagigs, like that commie operating system and that apple thing? It'd never work, focus on the super popular cellphone gaming comunity!"
Everything will be taken away from you.
No one's yet pointed out that in order to even play these games, you need a BREW-enabled phone. Verizon's just started coming out with them according to the article, and there's no mention of any other US carrier offering them.
Not to mention that this usually locks you into another contract with substantial penalties for early withdrawal. I think I'll stick with snake if I feel the need to play a game on my cellphone. Or just stick with my PDA for games, especially when I'm stuck on an airplane.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Here in Japan we've had a bunch of cell-phone games, though most of them single-player, for years.
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
Bunches of cellphone game makers have gone under (e.g., Unplugged Games, www.ungames.com), and the rest have been treading water by selling their backend technology. Telecom companies are understandably risk-averse right now (something about laying off a quarter or more of your staff will do that), and they haven't wanted to hear about games.
One company still hanging in there, waiting for the drought to end, is PureVis. They do a completely visual programming environment that was originally intended for easy production of online games. They started out as GameWorld.com; the name change is a sign of the times.
Simple graphics and fun games. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
symbian
Is that like the Symbian orgasm machine that those chicks use on those porno sites?
Brew might be obsolete (when compared with Symbian & Java), but the fact remains that Qualcomm is the biggest phone chip player in the USA. Their chipset includes Snaptrack GPS support (probably the only cellphone GPS solution worth anything for 911 location), so soon we might see BREW-based location-aware phone services all locked in to M$.
I can't wait!
I was at a conference last week and saw Macromedia Flash on many phones, PDAs and smartphones. It's pretty easy to develop content with Macromedia Flash, so making games looks easy too. Here is a site with lots of games.
http://www.flashenabled.com/mobile/
Quote: "Plagiarism is using others' ideas and words without clearly acknowledging the source of that information."
Source: http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/wts/plagiarism.html
The writeup for this story was, word for word, lifted from the story on CNN, without a single reference made to CNN. Slashdot is very sensitive to such things as copyright (even when it does not agree with them). The submitter should know better that, and the editors should as well. It is suggested that a direct reference to where the quote was lifted be added to this story writeup.
I'm shocked to hear that no company has stepped up fill the wireless void in gambling...
:-)
With so much money there I'm shocked no one has done it...
With like 10 cents a bet over the phone you could rake in some money.
btw... I just patented that idea
NO!
Cellphones == for TALKING on, perferably NOT in the middle of F*cking finals.
I swear. The damn things should be banned. Do you realize that people have ran into SCHOOL BUSES while talking on those things? HOW THE FUCKING HELL do you NOT notice a SCHOOL BUS?
Ugh.
Once again, cell phones are for TALKING on,
spending $300 on one of the fuckers is an immense move of stupididy.
Yeesh. buy a PDA (though with the recent story on PDA reliability I could see why you would be tempted not to. ^_^ ) for about the same price. Bigger screen, faster proccesor, more memory.
Then choose whatever cell phone plan gives you a free phone.
I actualy have a problem in that my AT
err
well lets see I haven't actualy USED the accursed thing in like 4 months;
so yah, 70 minutes should last me until sometime SLIGHTLY after I die.
Which means it is a serious pain in the ass to have to spend $20 every 3 months just on the off chance that Something Bad Might Happen to me and I may need to use my cellphone to Call Someone To Save My Ass.
As I said, a royal pain.
(and no I am not antisocial, I just perfer to talk to people IN PERSON. You know, real life? Bleh. Cell phones are evil, I _HATE_ the damn f*cking things, HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE them.
Ugh.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
- $400 - fee for 100 authentications with VeriSign, required for becoming an "Authenticated Developer," which you need to do to obtain a ClassID and get the rest of the developer tools.
- $1500 - cost of ARM BREW Builder, required to build your applet for a phone
- $unknown - Microsoft Visual Studio
The SDK is free to download, so there's something to work with. Anyone know any free ways to do this? More developer info here: http://www.qualcomm.com/brew/Now I'll have a good excuse why I didn't answer my mobile[*]: I was too busy fighting the dragon to get that +5/+5 blessed rustproof platinum longsword.
[*] I don't have a mobile in real life, but it was too tempting not to post this.
bash$
Games on phones (and more) that you can download have been around for a while. Sun's J2ME is implemented on quite a few mobile phones. I've got a Siemens SL45i that runs J2ME applications (not only games) pretty well. If you want a look at the sort of stuff available for these phones try midletcentral.com and Micro Java.
Some people say that these games appear on your cellphones so you will wear out the buttons and have to buy new phones.
"Playable through cellphones, wirelessly"
Sherlock.. Cellphones wireless, really? You have got to be kidding me!
You people fucking suck. For the past year, all I have seen is news leeched from other sources and re branded as 'your own'. Why the fuck should anyone pay for this shitty 'service'? News for nerds? More like 'news for plagiarists'. Pieces of leeching loser garbage. Here you go assholes:
a me s.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/ptech/06/01/cell.g
quote, unquote
As a student I have noticed a disturbing trend among my peers. I would say that at least 75% of them have cell phones. I often notice in class that many people are playing 'snake' and other cell phone games in class instead of paying attention. Although we would find it odd if someone brought a gameboy to class and began playing it while the teacher was explaining something, nobody seems to mind if someone is playing 'snake' on their cell phone. Personally I find these games to be academically destructive.
With the latest advances in cell phones, where they are quickly reaching PDA level, I believe it is time to ban their use in schools. Games like snake cause extreme academic decline. Cell phones are often used to cheat in class. Everyone forgets to turn them off (and games like snake ENCOURAGE people to leave them on!). Most institutions have sufficiant amounts of pay phones that people do not need cell phones. It baffles me why they are allowed in schools in the first place. Silly games like snake are just another reason why they should not be allowed.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Snake should not be called snake but rather NIBBLES. The original game the first of its kind was made by Bill Gates in QBasic. Duh! Bill should sue all these open source companies for ripping off Microsoft. Everyone knows these facts, along with the fact that Bill Gates is the best programmer of all time!
-Bill Gat.....err!.....Gables
its got the best feature... I can call people up... and talk to them.
Hey, I enjoyed Snake, it was fun. Actually, I'm sure it still is, I just need to find my old Nokia to play it. Now "Brick Attack", the "breakout" clone that came with my Kyocera - blecchh. Not nearly as good. Ah, well.
If all the world's a stage, anyone who says they want better lighting spends far too much time in a dark theatre.
i'm wondering if we would ever expand cellphones to a point where there would be expansion slots for us to like for example, turning our cellphone into a extream mobile gaming device (like with a bigger screen, connection, sounds, graphics, etc.) i mean a pda can do that already, i think a cellphone is certainly getting there.. =)
http://www.palmzone.net
Do those who make it care?
Do those who will empty-minded buy it care?
Do I, running Linux and happy as a clam, care about it, since I'd probably buy a PS2 + Linux Kit?
Well, I care. It's a curiosity. The other day I saw this female elephant giving birth, kinda beautiful...
Another beer, please... Ah, Links pre 6, wow, just downloaded pre3!
Don't these guys know about girls?
You'll definitely care if your favourite app isn't run on your device. BREW isn't run on a whole heck of a lot, though in the US, Verizon seems to be a big fan.
Personally, I'm a big fan of J2ME, though no one seems to have figured out how to make money selling those games. I think the coolest stuff will end up on i-Mode for a while, since AT&T's mMode allows for billing by bandwidth usage.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
nobody seems to mind if someone is playing 'snake' on their cell phone ... Games like snake cause extreme academic decline.
No. It's too late. I have to inform you that academia has already declined beyond hope. And it has been due to an even more harmful, destructive habit by students in lecture halls over the past century. It's far more widespread than phone games, and the economies of the situation ensure that it always will be. The tools of destruction? A blank pad of paper, a pencil, and the desire to draw amusing and unrelated pictures while the professor is talking. Horrible thing, that. My informal observations indicate that the deadly paper/pencil/imagination combination has even greater penetration rates in the student market than mobile phones. The numbers approach 100% and show little sign of ever declining. Besides, I find the swooping and jerking motions of doodling to be far more offensive and distracting than the relatively restrained thumb movements of playing Snake.
Check these guys, www.fathammer.com, they produce an engine for 3d-gaming on cellphones and pda's.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Wow, that article sure was light on detail. It read like someone trying to sell the casual reader on how cool BREW is going to be, casually ignoring the fact that every handset vendor on the face of the earth is shooting for the same market with their own technologies. The article mentioned that Motorola was competing with BREW on Java support, as if no other vendors have Java-enabled hansets (not even remotely true). Check out this link, found at the top of a Google search on "Java-enabled phone", for a list of a bunch of Java-enabled phones. The downloads page there lists a whole bunch of Java-based games for handsets.
Last time I looked at the public info on BREW (from the downloadable API documentation), it didn't look like it had any world-beating features to enable gaming. From the article, you'd think that BREW had the inside track on becoming the game development platform of choice for mobile phones.
IMHO, BREW looks like an awfully lightweight, low-feature application-development toolkit, appropriate to use in a low-memory handset. There's nothing here that Nokia isn't offering with their Series 60 platform, or that any of the other big players aren't doing with their own proprietary toolkits, I would expect.
The trick is that BREW has had a Java virtual machine ported to it, and game developers will develop to THAT, not to anything that is really BREW-specific, or even really enabled by BREW. But every handset vendor is doing the same thing with their own toolkit.
WirelessWeek: "Until recently, it seemed as if Verizon Wireless had turned up its nose at Java in favor of BREW. But the carrier has changed its attitude and recently confirmed it plans to offer Java-based applications, which it expects to hit the market in early 2003.
Ironically, the word comes as Verizon started giving its customers a sip of BREW, Qualcomm's binary runtime environment for wireless. The company began selling BREW applications to its 2G customers in San Diego in the first quarter as part of the first phase of a nationwide BREW deployment."
Read the rest here:
Verizon's Change of Heart
How would D&D be the same without being in a room full of your fellow dorks, playing with brightly colored funny shaped dice, and possibly wearing costumes? How can a cell phone provide that?
Nevermind that you could probably play it over the phone ANYWAY...
" America lags partly because only half of its adult population has cell phones, compared to 65 percent in Japan and 70 percent in Taiwan and Hong Kong. "
Most likely because unlike many countries, the land-line phone system in the US does not suck. AT&T at it's worst was never the pain in the ass that NTT is/was.
please. stop. read. think. don't give -1 because you don't believe in copyright rules. THANX
...to part stupid people from their money. Just like idiotic ring tones, crappy SMS pictures and pretty mobile phone face-plates.
When I have kids, I'm banning them from having a mobile phone.
CHILL OUT!!!
(no text)
You know what I hate? When I'm in the middle of raking it in in Slot Machine or beating my high score in Crab Catch on me cell (Sanyo 4500) and some insensitive prick calls my phone and the game quits. Like I care who's calling me. Sheesh, I was playing a game dammit! What else is my cell phone good for.
t'nera semordnilap
But does it run on Linux? :)
Truthfully, I'd rather have solitaire. That's what I used my PDA for. Since Sprint service in my area is pretty bad, I'm out of range a lot. If I've got a couple of minutes to kill and I'm out of range anyway, I might as well play something that does not require much time or thought. The game should save state between invocations so that it could be stopped and restarted at any time. I've played solitaire on a calculator before, so I know that it can be implemented using just a few keys for input, unlike NetHack.
t'nera semordnilap
I double sided taped (the good stuff though zip ties can work as well) my mobile phone to the back of a GameBoy Advance. Only problem is finding a case to fit.... had to resort to the cool-to-be-hip-looking bum bug. Once Nintendo make a flash cart to download games from the phone I can do awy with the need to carry game carts (though pirate multi game cards cut my sotrage needs in half).
Thanks for the link but it's already linked to - FROM THE ARTICLE. :)
Ich habe einen außergewöhnlich großen Penis!
I have an Ericsson T28w, meaning I can play a fully functional version of tetris and solitaire. Anyway, I play 99.9% of said games on my cell phone while waiting in the subway for my train. Now, maybe if the MTA could install some high powered cell transceivers in the tunnels to bounce around calls/data...
Because the line "Wanna play with my Gladiator?" gets the same dirty look as "Wanna play with my Snake?"
Of course, then I'd whip it out... My phone, that is...
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Before you mod me down, go talk on your goddam cell phone for a half an hour. Notice how one side of your head is all hot? That's the MICROWAVES COOKING YOU HEAD.
Or, if you have one of those belt clip things, it's only your OVARIES/TESTES that are being cooked.
Sure, I'm an alamrist. And no studies have ever shown that non-ionizing radiation poses a health risk. Well, how would you even conduct such a study in today's world? Find me a control group. In the early days of radio, a five watt signal from New York could be heard in Miami. Now you need 100,000 watts just to walk over your nearest competitor.
Yeah, it's off-topic. Especially if you have enough of a fucking life to play real pnp dnd with real people instead of over your cell phone.
Vacations on Tape
Instant Happiness
I'd rather just play games on my zaurus or handspring, at least I won't get charged, as there's tons of freeware games around.
Check my site out for ogg vorbis music produced with linux.
MAME on cell phones would be nice
Here it is:
http://koti.mbnet.fi/~haviital/
Probably won't be long before it's available for other Symbian phones as well, like the Nokia 7650 or Ericssony P800.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Batteries last longer with Symbian.
Oh My God!!!! i think im going to cum with excitement. Is it at all possible to play Golf!?! on a phone?!?! never before have i seen such incredible technology come into play (no pun intended). It certainly isnt possible to download games like this onto any of the PDAs out there, and of course, none of those PDAs can talk to each other anyway because no-one has invented infra red, cell-phone connectivity, GSM cards, or connecting cables. Wow, i have to hand it to them. I would never have been able to come up with the following ideas on my own:
1) A phone thats like a PDA in that you can connect it to your PC and download 3rd party software onto it.
2) A phone thats like a PDA in that it _is_ a phone and a PDA in the same device.
3) Developing more games for phones.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
You want to play with me? :)
BREW is a way to run native code on ARM-based phones. BREW applications have a huge amount of control over what the phone does. Therefore, access to this environment is strictly controlled - a BREW-supporting handset will not run an application unless it's signed by the operator. I believe BREW is primarily aimed at network operators, who currently have no way to add features and applications across all handsets on their network. Independent developers can make a pitch to the operators, but they cannot deliver any BREW apps without official blessing.
Actually, Gladiator and the like are on the Wireless Web, so any Web enabled Sprint phone could access them.
Games on wireless phones have been around for quite a while already. I'm not talking about snake or tic tac toe, but golf, motorcycle games, bowling, wrestling, etc. Sun's J2ME has been providing this technology on Nextel phones since March of 2001.
If you check out the games section of the iDEN Update Application Catalog you can see that many, many games can be downloaded to your phone today.
Now, graphically, these are nice. They will become compelling when Nextel releases it's next phone, the i95cl (press release here) which we should expect within the next 1-2 months. The primary benefit of the new phone being not only the color screen, but the ability to store many more applications through memory improvements as well as processor speed improvements.
I have seen GPS enabled multiplayer games in the works, and many other cool things to come from the Nextel developer community. If you are a developer, please check out the Nextel Developer Program and Motorola's iDEN Developer Program. Both sites have free registration, resources, and special pricing on some equipment for developers. Both also have procedures to establish co-marketing relationships.
Come play Moral Decay!
A friend of mine works for a company that was, for a time, seriously working on games for BREW cellphones. Programming-wise, everything you need, all the functions and graphical abilities, are there. The problem is that it's just too damn slow. BREW can't compete with Symbian, Palm OS, and Wince cellphones, I'm afraid.
I'm the stranger...posting to
You can download the SDK here: https://brewx.qualcomm.com/developer/sdk/download. jsp
I'm the stranger...posting to
BREW will fail in the mainstream, almost without a doubt. The obstacle is the same as many similar products before it (such as DivX) - the vendor (Qualcomm) has designed a system where they want to control it all. You have to download the software from your carrier, and your carrier can't offer it unless it's approved by Qualcomm.
While this sort of strategy gets the execs all excited because they get to stick their hand out for money at every step, these ploys fail because, in the end, there's nothing in it for the consumer. The developers are sick of it because they have to be certified against standards that even Qualcomm's own BREW demo apps don't pass, and they have to pay to recertify every time the standards are changed or their app fails. The consumer doesn't want it because this "walled garden" approach by the vendors has no value for them.
Good concept, bad business decisions.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
ian.
ian
Did anyone here actually try BREW (go to www.qualcomm.com/brew/ for info)? They will charge monthly fees for users to have a program, developers need to pay thousands of bucks for a compiler and verisign keys and for all that you get something that looks like COM. Better write those games in J2ME :-)
I am very proud of my 999 on the Nokia 6190 - but I often have wondered if 999 was the cap, because I played for a VERY long time and ive gotten into the 900s many times before that w/o much time spent. Oh course, that is on the fastest speed.
I now have a samsung phone with 0 games, sigh -- my old samsung at least had othello, which I had over a 1000 wins in.
My mom's cricket phone has snake but it tends to get 'bogged down' and even on the fastest setting, at times it goes stupid slow and has issues responding. who woulda thunk it that a cell phone would run low on memmory
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Many of these types of games and more where being demonstrated on JavaONE this year on J2ME devices so I would get too hung up on BREW. In fact I wouldn't even bother with that technology.
BREW is currently a CDMA only technology. The majority of the world uses GSM thought. (Americans sometimes forget this since CDMA has a larger, but weakening, footprint in the US.) The majority of carriers and handset manufacturers are committed to J2ME in someway. Motorola has gone so far as to pledge that all of its phones will ship with J2ME by the end of this year. Even CDMA carrier Sprint PCS have decided to forego BREW for J2ME when they launch thier new service this August.
If your a developers, where would you put your efort first?
J2ME has its limtiations though. Then again so do these devices -- With a screen not much larger then an airmail stamp we're not even talking game boy here. The limitations of J2ME are currently being addressed with initatives such as Project Monty (a new high performance virtual machine), Mobile Game API and the Mobile Media API.
<tim/>
---
http://tima.mplode.com/
Should be available at any Verizon dealer over the next couple of months. I know the dealer I work for is expecting 3 or 4 models by the end of July.
Should be some good stuff! And a lot of the applications will have "DEMO" capability, where you won't have to pay to try them out!
Pretty neat sounding stuff, from what I hear.. A lot cooler than "oh boy, with 3G i can laptop surf at 56k.. yippee"
We don't want gnome for windows because we would be less superior. We don't want IIS to actually run, because we would be less superior.
And I don't want nethack on cellphones because it would make my agenda vr3 less superior.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
No one's yet pointed out that in order to even play these games, you need a BREW-enabled phone. Verizon's just started coming out with them according to the article, and there's no mention of any other US carrier offering them.
Not to mention that this usually locks you into another contract with substantial penalties for early withdrawal. I think I'll stick with snake if I feel the need to play a game on my cellphone. Or just stick with my PDA for games, especially when I'm stuck on an airplane."
No, you're wrong. Jam Dat Mobile Inc. has been providing Gladiator to Sprint for quite some time. Porting it to BREW is a brand new innovation and doesn't change the fact that its already out there.
http://www.jamdatmobile.com/
Driving along and playing a racing game.... my head hurts just thinking about...
ASS:
1 A donkey.
ARSE:
1 buttocks
Essentially, BREW does much of the heavy lifting that wireless carriers prefer not to tackle. It is also an open standard that supports multiple languages including the Java platform -- which means game developers don't have to worry about writing multiple versions for different devices.
This statement is misleading. BREW is a "Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless" by Qualcomm. It is just a friggin' API for phones with an ARM CPU! The only reason they claim Java - which does not ship by the way - is that is is conceivable to port and run Java under any environment. Putting a JVM on top of BREW is totally useless since the JVM does not need BREW whatsoever to run on an ARM - it's all marketing hype promoting the false associating with Write-Once Run-Anywhere. BREW competes with Java and locks you into the Qualcomm licensing machine. BREW is not open (or maybe it is, check for yourself here), not cross-platform (ARM only), and does about as much for reducing the need for different software versions as Win32 - or any other proprietary "environment" - does for the desktop.
Anybody want a peanut?
But can the games be played on this type of palm?