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Palm Pre and WebOS Get Native Gaming
rboatright writes "WebOS developers have been waiting, and with the 1.3.5 release, Palm's open source page suddenly listed SDL. Members of the WebOS internals team took that as a challenge and within 24 hours had a working port of Doom running in SDL on the Pre, in a webOS card. 48 hours later, they not only had Quake running, but had found in the latest LunaSysMgr the requirements to launch a native app from the webOS app launcher from an icon just like any other app. At the same time, the team demonstrated openGL apps running. With full native code support, with I/O available via SDL, developers now have a preview into Palm's future intent with regard to native code SDK's, and a hint of what's coming."
They're already working on it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKcm97mZb30
SDL is awesome. Thanks SDL.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I don't game on my phone, as I use a corporate cell phone. But I do game on my Nokia N810. ScummVM, some solitaire games, and Simon Tatham's puzzle collection are installed. I play when I'm usually stuck somewhere waiting for something beyond my control, like a doctor/dentist appointment.
apple started off with "web" only development - then finally released a native SDK. google utilized it's Java like language (dalvik) - then finally released a native SDK (NDK).. there has been a native SDK since day one available for the Palm Pre
The Android NDK is different from the Palm Pre SDK - NDK can only be used for number crunching. Front end still has to be implemented in Java. So no "recompile, deploy" as in the Palm Pre SDK.
On my G1 I play Solitaire, occasionally a Mahjongg solitaire game, Jewels which is Bedazzled knockoff, Tetroid (obvious) and my current fave, Bonsai Blast.
On a typical G1, you can drain the battery with 3 hours of Bonsai Blast. 2 hours if you have an original battery now.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
We have scummVM working now, a release should happen tonight.
See the webos-internals.org wiki
It is not a tech demo. It is a fully playable app. The app launches into a demo. Backswipe in the gesture area to bring up the game menu. Full details of keybindings are on the webos-internals.org wiki. As of this morning, we are using part of the screen for a simulated joystick, which eases gameplay.
Hi, I'm dtzWill--the developer who ported quake over.
This is not just a tech demo (well opengl, for now, is) but quake is/very/ playable!
Much effort has gone into making this more playable over the last two days or so-- the beta seemed to hit news sites, that was back when I was fighting things like the compiler breaking my code on anything other than -O0.
See the wiki for almost latest information.
Note that instructions to try out the latest before I release are on the wiki.
Finally, a release is probably going to be made tonight so those that own a pre... beexcited!