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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."
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.
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?
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
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
Simple graphics and fun games. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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
Where the hell did the rest of my post go?
Supposed to be
----
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.
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and so forth
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
::looks around:: Why is /. freaking out cuz of an amphersand?
......
try this again
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I actualy have a problem in that my ATT prepaid phone expires minutes after 3 months. Additionaly I have to purchase minutes in $20 increments, which amounts to about 70 minutes of talk time.
Which will last me;
err;
well lets see I haven't actualy USED the accursed thing in like 4 months;
so yah, 70 minutes should last me until sometime SLIGHTLY after I die.
---
and so forth
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Now I'll have a good excuse why I didn't answer my mobile[*]: I was too busy fighting the dragon to get that +5/+5 blessed rustproof platinum longsword.
[*] I don't have a mobile in real life, but it was too tempting not to post this.
bash$
Some people say that these games appear on your cellphones so you will wear out the buttons and have to buy new phones.
Yes Stupid choice for a charecter but, ya gotta live with it...
For future reference... to write an ampersand write
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.
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"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
" 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.
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
And computers are for computing? "Do not play games on them! Only use them to perform calculations!" Right? You're a true visionary!
Hey jackass, guess what, that is what they ARE being used for.
It just so happens to be faster and easier to have a computer keep track of all of the various numbers in a DnD game and do the math for them then it is to do it by hand.
The pretty little graphics that accompy everything are just extra frills.
Same with board games or math or such, the computre is used as an AID to something else.
Eventualy they spread out into broad based wide spectrum multipurpose tools; ok great; now we have computers, and hopefuly soon they will be able to make breakfast (err, or maybe hopefuly not!)
But a CellPHONE is exactly that, A SPECIALIZED TOOL DESIGNED FOR ONE PURPOSE Shoving more features into it then it was originaly designed for ends up:
A: Driving your price up higher then if you redesigned a tool from the ground up for the desired purposes
B: Makes the user interface suck
and
C: Reduces overall maximum product potential
Which all SUCK.
People pay HUNDREDS of dollars for a cell phone with VERY BASIC and low level PDA functions when it would be easier to get a small cheapish PDA and glue a cheap cellphone on to the back of it (not over the battery casing!) and have all of your problems solved at once.
But noooo, people have to continue to act STUPID.
Not to mention that now I will have to put up with some ASSHOLE having even MORE bleeps and bloops going from their phones during class.
May I give a quick Amen to the proffesors out there who auto-boot anybody STUPID enough to bring a cellphone into class?
Like of them said;
"You ever heard the expression 'Treat every gun like a loaded gun'? Well I have the same rule of cellphones, 'treat every cell phone like it is on'. No cellphone is ever really off, so to prevent any troules just do not bring them into my classroom at all."
Love that policy.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
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
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
And all of the students that didn't have cell phones in class that used to be playing snake would now (thanks to banning them, in your dreamworld) would now be talking with their friends, doodling, fiddling with other crap, or simply sleeping.
Cell phones aren't the cause of academic decline, it's apathy...
Oh btw... I carry my cell phone on me 24/7... Including class. Ya know what I do, I put it on silent... So I can play snake if I wish and if someone calls, my phone still won't make a peep.
You must remember that back in the day computers where "A SPECIALIZED TOOL DESIGNED FOR ONE PURPOSE ", being a calculator....
Becareful of your statments... not everything fits into the boxes you draw for them.
J2ME doesn't have multimedia capabilities just yet. There are multimedia extensions in the works right now, but it'll be a year or more before we see them in mobile phones.
The BREW stuff is Qualcomm's proprietary method for doing this stuff and IMHO not going to be around for the long haul, once Sun gets the multimedia stuff worked out.
-Russ
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.
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
Actually, J2ME support (MIDP) will be offered on BREW in the future anyway, so that midlets can be run on the device alongside "native" applications. After Sun gets their next version of MIDP finished, they'll likely move onto that as well. Qualcomm is working with Java vendors.
ian.
ian
A couple of my friends here at Harvey Mudd College created a development chain for BREW applications using GCC. The project description is here
They ended up patching GCC's ARM support a lot. The phones use a offset based memory layout, but GCC ARM outputs position independent code. By the end of the project they'd gotten a large number of pre-existing games to compile and load onto the phone.
Look for these tools soon.
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!
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.
Funny, I thought the article in question is discussing BREW, which also mentions that BREW-enabled phones have only really recently started to be rolled out on a "limited" basis. So, that would mean that, yes, you would need to upgrade your phone in order to play BREW games.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Perhaps English isn't your primary language. Perhaps you're just like most people who do speak it as their primary language and don't understand the finer points. "Gladiator" is but a single game. Single. Singular. Meaning one. If Electronic Arts' "Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf", or "Dungeons & Dragons" (the other two games specifically mentioned in the article) are available for non-BREW phones, then you have a point. A single game that's already available for Web-enabled phones doesn't mean that any and all games being provided via BREW are already available. As such, the statement "No one's yet pointed out that in order to even play these games, you need a BREW-enabled phone." still stands.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken