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Getting Started In Android Game Development
rbgrn writes "If you're interested in developing a game for the Android platform, there is a lot you need to know. If you have previous experience with game development, moving over to the Android platform won't be all that difficult. You will mostly just need to learn the architecture and API. If you're new to game development, here is a list of must-knows for getting started in Android game development. This is a good starting point for developers seeking to write any type of mobile game."
They're not selling a product here, so much as a concept, but why is this on Slashdot's front page again?
Mind you, I'm excited about Android, but what here is newsworthy?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
jacking it for Obama!
I really didn't consider it, but there would be a major market for an MMORPG for Android. Think about it, when you are waiting for a bus you can hop on to finish a quest, if you want you can receive alerts about your character at work and the keyboard would make typing messages easy. The only problem I see with all games for Android is all the phones that could (potentially) use it. For example, a phone with only a touch screen is going to demand a totally different form of input than a phone with both a touch screen and keyboard, as is a phone that is all buttons and no touch screen. And I can see this really being a limiting factor, does the Android marketplace allow you to "restrict" apps to certain phones or download different versions?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I hate games that don't do this. If the computer player and I are the same species, we should have the same limitations. Why should the computer player be able to do more stuff than a human player?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I'd like to see an RPG that uses the google phone's GPS feature to involve you in quests that blend real life and the video game universe. Perhaps certain tasks can only be achieved from a particular location in RL. Perhaps you are assigned to meet a particular player in RL in a certain location and achieve some goal together.
This is like Hideo Kojima's game Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand, which comes with a solar sensor for your Gameboy, and certain portions of the game cannot be completed without actual sunlight. However, GPS adds a lot of potential that hasn't been explored.
If Linux hasn't developed into a viable gaming platform, what hope does Android have? The iPod is already a bigger gaming target platform than all Linux distro's combined.
Android will not succeed as a gaming platform, and therefore won't succeed at all.
Clean and concise. Tells you exactly what you need to know. I've been looking for this exact information for the last month now. Nice to finally have it in one spot.
And no, this isn't about the GNAA supporting the Prop-8 marches in front of the Mormon Temples in Los Angeles. You see, this day in age, people don't have an actual product in implemented proto-type. They sit down and think of the future interest and the failure, then decide to sell that future to whomever is silly enough to go down that path until their death. Consider the Amish perspective; they're the ancestors to the marketer-class. They knew that marketing was a gimick, so they created the greatest ploy and plot to take over as much land as possible and stay under a cloak of simplistic living to avoid the Brittish Crown collecting Income Tax on their former colonists. Just 20 minutes ago I saw an advertisement on Television about a company using Amish labor to produce a 1-foot deep by 1-foot tall by 2-foot wide portable fireplace unit and that is completely contrary to their scripture. There is a patern in the economy that looks upon the possibility of standards and distinguished societal structures and political subdivisions to disregard their charter and just jump into the myre and slop that their forefathers and grantors waved from them. Consider all the other business models that will fail, but the greatest one was of the market-droid who was sold down river by the Amish. The most successful models are the most taxed, simple because it's Governments cut of the drug that people are willing to pay such high initerest on such little yield. Booze, tobacco, prostitution, and porn are all forewarned and despised in the Holy Bible that there evinces a diametric plot of society to create a worker class inspired by progress and efficiency to work maintenance and grunt-work to carry the ancestral denizens of simple living Amish caste through the present. The same story is seen in the tribes of Israel conspiring against Benjamin to sell him down the well as a slave to Egypt, yet he saves them all by his wit to progress where they could only speculate as dreamers.
As for me, seeing how all the Beer Taverns, Smoke Shops, Video Arcades, and Porn Stores are slowly merging into their customary futures as laundromat general-stores to compete against Walmart I am looking at a dream that none dare venture towards; a dream so cunning that it'll work by the willingness of the sweat and blood of the new form of brainless slave that pays for the privilege to power by enterprise: the physical fitness dweeb. My design is inexpensive in a 3-tear product placement that not even Walmart would dare such: A library with exercise equipment and internet kiosks to fill with paying-pettlers to generate power to run a next-door laundromat, where the people pay again to wash their clothes and generate heat that runs the bakery of the nextdoor bar and grill, where paying-patrons pay to receive cooked vegetarian food raised from the rooftops and drink an endless mine-shaft of beer brewed underneath, and the next-door vintage video arcade houses all the ripped ROM and custom mimic cabinetry to house the biggest marijuana-growing franchise in the verry housing which the embedded Linux computers don't occupy. It all starts with sheep of Billy Blanks, Chuck Norris, Jazzersize, LA Fitness, and 24 Hour Fitness, to harness their power, so people like me
Can Prepare the World For...THIS
My pinball gallery is almost complete!
Write a Web game application and ensure it works smoothly in the Android browser. i.e. Tweaking the CSS for bigger buttons etc. etc.
BONUS: Should work on the Iphone too and any Web browser ... yowsers!
I think the most compelling games platform is the Web. Someone needs to write a cool simple game like BRE or Planetarium. =)
While I have all the game development experience, and the Java development skills, and the interest in supporting the Android platform in my spare time, I have to say that at this point, I can't see spending the dough on buying a G1.
I don't mind the idea of paying for a data plan for a data-oriented device, but I just don't need a phone. The cheapest voice plan is more expensive than the data plan. With the required voice plus data plus hardware, I'd pay $1,520 over two years. Many little apps are being released for free (which is as it should be) but we have yet to see how for-pay apps will fare on the Android Market.
There's no way for users to get a G1 with no voice plan, as they do with a Sidekick. AT&T apparently briefly offered a "deaf users" plan, or said they were going to do so, but then retracted that offer.
I guess the only other option would be to develop what I can on the SDK without owning a device, then ask other people to help me test it. That doesn't really seem particularly fun or useful, if I can't use the apps I write.
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I'm not java expert, but I have written some things for Blackberry (a Klondike Solitaire game for one). I've done some very, very performance intensive work on Pocket PC (Quake 1 & 2, my own 3D engine with ARM ASM optimizations, etc). All in all, Java will be a substantial hindrance and cap the performance of what can be achieved on the hardware when it comes to real-time rendering.
As a small example, most mobile devices use 16 bit RGB 565 pixel format, and the CPUs are RISC 32 bit. So for maximum performance, you try to always work with two pixels at once to halve the instructions required. With java, if your pixel buffer is of a 16 bit type then you cannot simply cast a pointer to a 32-bit aligned value in the array and then do 32 bit math on it. At the very least you will have to pack and unpack the two shorts individually. I hope someone can correct me if I'm wrong on that (that you can do 32 bit math on two adjoining, aligned 16 bit values with no extra overhead), because I'll certainly make use of it.
With these types of devices, if you work within the APIs - using available drawing primitives and hardware rendering capability - you'll be in decent shape. However if you need to do direct pixel manipulation (rotozooming, custom 3D renders, voxel terrain, bumpmapping, etc) then the language will be barrier.
When performance is most important (inner loop of texture mapper rasterizers for example), nothing can beat hand-coded ASM native to the CPU. I have a friend who can code StrongARM / XScale ASM like a fiend. He can take my best, carefully optimized C loops and usually cut the execution time in half over the compiler.
So not only can't you do decent high-level performance-optimized coding in Java, but the option of hand-optimized routines native to the processor are out.
Better known as 318230.
The fact that Symbian C++ developers have a bit of a learning curve to climb before they can produce android apps should be a source of encouragement for anyone who is starting from scratch to develop one. Let one of the kids on the bench have a turn at bat.