Shawn Rutledge wrote:
On 2/11/06, Brandon J. Van Every <address@hidden> wrote:
Man this is so early 90s. Back when we all wrote our own 3D APIs from
scratch! Look into OpenGL ES and what devices support it. ES is supposed
to be the stripped down version of OpenGL for such gizmos.
Yes it claims to use fixed-point math, just like it should. So what's
your favorite free implementation then?
I don't have one. I think making games on small devices is junk. I'll
worry about OpenGL ES if that's what Playstation3 is using. If I go
that route, I'm certainly not going to be worrying about free
implementations.
klimt claims to be very similar (maybe it's a subset) but not quite
compliant. Are there licensing issues, or having to pay in order to
claim to be compliant?
Dunno. I'm a game designer. The most basic question is, what game are
you trying to write? Then, to what audience are you trying to sell
it? Do small portable devices fit your vision? They don't for mine.
Cellphone games, at any rate, seems like a really bozo market to try to
succeed in. You can't brand your product, you've got like a 15
character game title in some big list of "free downloadables." There
are articles on Gamasutra about this sort of thing. Cellphones look
like the game industry "writ small." Like if you want to do something
that was cutting edge in the early 80s or whatever. YMMV for
handhelds. Probably much better money there, and I have no idea what
technologies they're using.
Yeah, so, 2 years from now nobody will care. You'll waste all this time
trying to optimize for obsolescent technology. Reminds me when I was going
I'm talking about phones, the Zaurus, the Nokia 700, etc. 3D games
are starting to show up on phones, presumably using OpenGL ES. Of
course, maybe in a couple generations they will have real 3D
accelerators but I'm not seeing much of it yet.
This is only more to the point on cell phones. The standards are
unstable. There's no marketing potential in it. So why bother? Have
you heard about any compelling cell phone games at all? That should
tell you something. It's not like they're brand new. I'm still
waiting for someone to inform me why, as a game designer, I'm supposed
to care about cell phones.
It's
better to pick one platform that's worth *money* and do a decent job on it.
Like what kind of platform?
Either Windows, one of the consoles, or one of the handhelds. You
could even do Macs if you're funky. They have a tiny market, but also
few game developers, so almost no competition. Linux is useless as a
consumer desktop OS. They can't get 3D drivers right because of NVIDIA
/ GPL tiffs, and that issue isn't going away. Forget the cell phones,
it's a waste of time. Keep your eye on whether the market conditions
change for cell phones, though. It just doesn't pay to be the 1st one
pouring blood on the table for stuff like this.
I think I've been there, done that. I know everyone has to reinvent the
world anew for themselves, but I hope you heed the warnings of older souls.
I'm probably not as young as you think, just haven't done much 3D, and
try hard not to get too jaded about technology in general, although it
does seem kindof inevitable doesn't it?
I'd feel a lot better if I had a working Chicken toolchain. I'm
probably going to give up on Eclipse and Schemeway. For some reason,
the Schemeway interpreter doesn't work in recent versions of Eclipse.
Meanwhile, I haven't found Eclipse particularly intuitive to use. It
looks nice and is reasonably documented, but there's still a learning
curve for getting non-Java things to work with it. The thing that
bugged me the other day is trying to search files to find stuff. Seems
like Eclipse wants me to set up all these projects and whatnot before I
can do that. The idea of just picking a directory and saying "search
it for what I want" seems alien. So, I gotta RTFM... and that's the
main thing I didn't like about XEmacs. If I gotta RTFM anyways no
matter what, then I may be better off with XEmacs. I don't have to
worry about the Scheme tools being "bleeding edge" and so forth.
Cheers,
Brandon Van Every
|