id Software's John Carmack has posted an interesting overview of his adventures in game development on mobile phones:

I have a small list of games that I think would work out well, but what I decided to work on is DoomRPG – sort of Bard’s Tale meets Doom. Step based smooth sliding/turning tile movement and combat works out well for the phone input buttons, and exploring a 3D world through the cell phone window is pretty neat. We talked to Jamdat about the business side of things, and hired Fountainhead Entertainment to turn my proof-of-concept demo and game plans into a full-featured game.

The post includes his analysis of how well Java and mobiles combine to make a gaming platform and is a good read (and unlike a lot of his posts about arcane programming and rocket science, its relatively easy to understand).

My favourite part:

Write-once-run-anywhere. Ha. Hahahahaha. We are only testing on four platforms right now, and not a single pair has the exact same quirks. All the commercial games are tweaked and compiled individually for each (often 100+) platform. Portability is not a justification for the awful performance.

Very interesting!

Haha, nice blog. I've been curious as to what Carmack thinks of Java, being a low-level guy.

Does anyone know what id is working on currently? Last I heard they were thinking of working on a game that diverges from first-person shooters, to another genre .. or mixed-genre.

far out... although I cant see myself playing it. I can barely stand using my mobile for phone calls.

trog, do you follow Carmack's AA adventures? They've had an interesting (read:expensive) update on their site as well.

I cant wait for ROE. If I could afford to, I would chuck a sickie and spend all day finishing it off. (sorry slightly off topic)

The comment on portability is so true. That's a significant part of the reason why cellphone gaming won't take off compared to other portable gaming platforms, like the DS or PSP, when you talk about games most of us are use to (semi high quality graphics, speed and to a lesser extent, a standard-ish control system).

The only area I can see taking off any time soon will be the use of cellphones in regards to mixed reality/location based games. Think Geocaching but more game-like rather than just a treasure hunt.

There are some great mixed reality games being developed around the world but none have become really commercially successful. I guess it will just take a few really simple but fun and interesting concepts, to get a significant segment of gamers seriously into mobile gaming.

last edited by treeoflife at 13:33:33 29/Mar/05

The size of the mobile phone game market actually somewhat surprises me. On one hand I can't see it being a huge thing, though it's bigger than I would expect it to be on the basis of there's only so much you can be interested in playing on a mobile phone; on the other hand there are lots of great ideas of things you can do on a phone and flog them off to customers at like $5/pop, from that side of things I'm surprised it's not a lot bigger an industry than it is (and while I know a handful of J2ME developers myself, it's just that I never actually see their finished products out there).

Term caught a trog!

such an iD fanboi

poor term is so old he doesn't remember they've only made like 2 doom games in the last ten years

There's Doom 1 (3 episodes), followed by the later release of Ultimate Doom (4th episode), Doom 2, Final Doom (TNT and Plutonia, and yes it does say "Id" on the box), Doom 3, and Resurrection of Evil.

I'm not sure how that's "like" 2 Doom games. There's 6 releases before we even nitpick over shareware/commercial and Collectors Doom. About the only thing you could debate is whether the flogged horse is dead or not. However, given the tendency of Id to make awesome engines with not-so-awesome gameplay, I dread the thought of Doom on a mobile phone.

(and while I know a handful of J2ME developers myself, it's just that I never actually see their finished products out there).

Yeah exactly. Where do all these projects/products end up I wonder... Some finish and are never seen again.

About the only thing you could debate is whether the flogged horse is dead or not.

Then there's all the console releases too. Doom3 Xbox has just come out overseas, so no doubt there'll be DS/PSP versions following soon. Then XBox 2 and what not.

(and while I know a handful of J2ME developers myself, it's just that I never actually see their finished products out there).

They probably get about halfway through and then realise that its not fast enough and recode it in something more streamlined and efficient, like VB! haha

They probably get about halfway through and then realise that its not fast enough and recode it in something more streamlined and efficient, like VB! haha

C#/DOT.NET has some really good points on WinCE phones, in fact it is damn right uber.

J2ME is a flaming bag of s*** on the mobile phones. Sun hasn't been putting a lot of focus on developing them, instead they want the phone manufacturers to develop the jre for each phone type, which obviously isn’t paying off. The second largest problem that java has isn’t speed related, but that it is limited to a sandbox that is as (if not more) restrictive than the applet sandbox rules.

A good example is how totally homosexual it is to set up Bluetooth connects with Java. Basically it just wasn’t worth the time and effort to do anything interesting with Bluetooth with java, which is a really sad realisation as Bluetooth on phones has some really interesting things that could be played with.

Even the default symbian library that Nokia has released is homosexual as f***, it isn’t very easy to actually arc up anything outside of the program (such as making a program to sms people).

Python is pretty rad for mobile phones, not only is it pretty fast, easy to code and you can arc up C/C++ (symbian) to do the complex stuff that python hasn’t got drivers for. Not to mention that python just ignored the sandbox rules, so you can do fun stuff right off the bat.

C#/DOT.NET has some really good points on WinCE phones, in fact it is damn right uber.

Yeh, Windows CE is pretty decent and I imagine developing for it would be a lot less utterly lame as it seems to be on Java-based phones. One of the bizarre points I found in Carmack's article was that there are different JVMs for each phone, which all seem to behave differently - which seems to completely defeat the purpose of even using Java in the first place. I would have thought Sun would have had fairly rigorous standards that JVM developers had to adhere to in order to maintain the cross-platform capabilities.

Followup post by Carmack in the Slashdot thread.

Yeh, Windows CE is pretty decent and I imagine developing for it would be a lot less utterly lame as it seems to be on Java-based phones. One of the bizarre points I found in Carmack's article was that there are different JVMs for each phone, which all seem to behave differently - which seems to completely defeat the purpose of even using Java in the first place. I would have thought Sun would have had fairly rigorous standards that JVM developers had to adhere to in order to maintain the cross-platform capabilities.

Sun does have some pretty stringent standards, but I don't think that any of the phone manufactorers are that interested in actually following them. At the momment they are more interested in trying to become the most popular phone. To make it worse the J2ME kit (the one from sun) is somewhere between java1.0 and 1.2, none of the good features of java 1.2 (java 2) and all of the bad parts of java 1. Of course this is ignoring the fact that Java is up to 1.5 (java 5) or about 20-30 iterations along. So their mobile phone development is really, really lacking.

Interestingly enough almost all of the major phone manufactorers have (or are going to) implement flash, including some easy ways to do interesting stuff (like phone/sms/mms/bluetooth connect and so on (even if it is actionscript 1 yuck). If that happens Sun has pretty much lost the mobile war; flash is very, very popular, and creating crappy flash games is as easy as piss. The only problem with it is that it is a little bloaty.

The biggest problems that Java has for mobile phone development is that phones are slow and light in memory. Combine that with: Java is slower than native languages to boot, the mobile java API's suck balls and have no optimisations that later version of java have, java is a memory hog (<1.2 even more so) and that processor speed is of dire importance to making java a worth while language.

I think I need a clupon.

Mobile Phones are just that phones. I would have thought that if you wanted to play games and other neto stuff you would just skip past the mobile phone and stop at the Pocket PC type things, with mobile phone technology intergrated into that. Wouldnt that give people many more options when it comes to making applications like games?

huzzah!

Someone else just wants their phone to be a phone.

The only thing I want on my phone is a silence button. If I want to play games I get my gameboy.