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Carmack On Mobile VR Development
An anonymous reader writes: After surprising everyone by demonstrating Samsung's new VR headset at IFA yesterday, John Carmack spoke with Gamasutra about the difficulties of developing virtual reality in a mobile environment. He also had some interesting comments on developing for Android: 'Okay, there's the normal hell of moving to a new platform — and I gotta say, Android was more hell to move to than most consoles I've adopted. Just because of the way Google has to position things across a diverse hardware spectrum, and because Google still doesn't really endorse native code development — they'd still rather everyone worked in Java. And that's a defensible position, but it's certainly not what you want to be doing on a resource-constrained VR system. So brace yourself: Android setup and development really does suck. It's no fun at all.' He also had insights on building compute-intensive software — if you go to full speed on all CPU and GPU cores, you can expect overheating and thermal throttling in less than a minute.
Mobile development is a joke in general. Unless you're a very established big name, you get lost in a sea of copycat apps. And then you have the piss poor performance, fragmentation and mutant java stack issues with Android. The iOS app store is run by goosestepping nazis who are happy to ruin years of development to reject your app because they might be thinking of doing something similar or because they simply don't like it. Or because it actually does something useful and the UI is "too complex" for teeny-bopper facebook junkies.
I wouldn't waste my time on developing for the current crop of smartphones if somebody put a gun to my head and a $5,000 check in front of me. NewtonOS and Windows CE were actually far more USEFUL platforms than the current game machines with dial pads.
Google strongly encourages the use of Java rather than the NDK. And have you ever *used* the NDK? It is a gigantic pain in the ass to work with, presumably because Google hasn't put a whole lot of effort into it.
I have been an Android developer for two years and a Java developer for almost 15, and even a former Google employee, and...in my estimation, Carmack is 100% right.
Despite how much more I like Java than lower-level languages, Google's software stack is a complete disaster. It's poorly designed, bug-riddled garbage that I have actually considered re-writing parts of, even in the middle of a high-pressure project. What makes matters so much worse is Android's distribution model: rather than the direct-to-consumer approach that Apple takes, Google distributes Android indirectly via its device vendors, who can provide arbitrarily modified or out-of-date versions of the infrastructure that you're expected to support when dealing with angry customers who don't understand why their network stack mysteriously doesn't work.
The NDK is not an answer. It's a wreck because JNI is a wreck. I've been using JNI since 2002, and almost nothing has evolved since then - it was never anything more than a token olive branch to luddite C++ developers in 1995, and probably never will be. Ultimately, Java is excellent for mature devices (like servers), but is not suitable for emerging devices (like all the mobile devices we're seeing now) because of its runtime overhead.
Despite Apple's many shortcomings, one of the key points they get right is that mobile development needs natively compiled, non-runtime (or thin-runtime) languages. And, of course, libraries that work. Apple isn't exactly the gold standard on that either, but at least they're miles ahead of "beta early, beta often" Google.