[gameprogrammer] Re: Carmack on Java phone games

Frank Henry wrote:
> First and foremost java mobile games are still very young. B&W phones 
> are still in the market and the differences between phones could hardly 
> be greater.
Hehe, when I read this, I thought you know very small about mobile 
development. Well, my opinion is, altough there are BW phones in the 
market, nobody gives a sh*t, because they are very few. And there ARE 
huge differences in the phones. Sometimes they are differences in the 
same phone but with different firmwares (eg. SE T610, and some nokias also).

And which is very bad from programming point of view: there are huge 
differences between speed, and I mean executing normal calculations. For 
example for an RTS I made a path finding algorithm. On the nokia 3650 it 
run for about 200 milliseconds, on the siemens s55 it run for 4 
seconds!!! That's 20 times slower, ant this is pure calculation. I 
wonder what PC game developers would do, if they had to do with such big 
differences in CPU speed ;-) Imagine, it's like you have to write Quake 
3 to be able to run on a Pentium 100...

> People seem to think of mobile phones as mini PSPs or what.

Yes, it's true, and why not? A better phone has almost the same CPU, and 
newer phones even have graphic accelaration.

> Now you can say what you want about java but it does its job and that 
> quite well. 

Well, maybe it does his job, sometimes, but not very well.
Java implementation on phone sucks!! They are some very insane bugs:
1) GC does not work well: you should run it manually periodically, or 
otherwise you will run out of memroy
2) Some phones (Nokia 7650, 3650) leak memory (it's quite a nice 
feeling, when you can do nothing about it... )
3) On siemens C65/S65 I had the following bug:

g.setColor(variable ? 0xff0000 : 0x0000ff);

I had to replace it with:

if (variable)
        g.setColor(0xff0000);
else
        g.setColor(0x0000ff);

(if somebody finds out what is the bug, please let me know ;-) All I 
know is second version works, while for the first version it skipped a 
lot of instructions. I suppose it was a bad jump)

... and so on ...

> let's be realistic!
I am, I'm in mobile development buisniss for two years, I worked with 
about 10+ phones...

> Also java was designed with safty in mind. No java application is able 
> to mess with the internals of a mobile phone.

Hmm, I wonder why my nokia 3650 gaves me sometimes symbian error 
messages, and why my sagem myx5-2 restarts sometimes just out of 
nowhere... and why sometimes I have to wait for several minutes on the 
t610 tog et some response... even from the phone itself when running a 
java app. Oh, and because of safety they are adding filesystem acces to 
the newest mobile phones (eg. 6630)

> see the following link for a incomplete listing:
> http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/mobility/device/device?api=6

And thus different implementation, and we just got back that we have to 
port the java games for each device...

> Not to mention that it is a PHONE and not a gaming device.

Where some people spend more time playing than talking...

> I would never dare say anything about John's work without knowing the 
> details and would recommend John not do so about mobile gaming.

Ok, I'm a little bit lost here.
Until know I see things like this:
- John said working with mobiel phones is hard
- You said no, it's not that hard
- than again you said: but John should't work in this buisness, because 
it's hard... hm... maybe it's too early today for me... but I don't see 
the logic here...

> what we have to live with. Though I do get my laughs when they get into 
> the mobile game dev and fall flat on their faces!

If somebody has a lot of money, and a few good coders and pixel artist, 
then he wont fall on his face :-) I'm sure John has the money, probably 
knows a good pixel artist, maybe all he needs is a good j2me 
programmer... anybody knows his email address ?-)


-- 
Best regards,
Szasz Pal
----------------
Space Software Studio
http://www.spacesoftwarestudio.com


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