Whenever you go through a tech book it’s important to keep in mind that the environment has changed since the time of writing, and therefore the author’s word should not be taken as gospel. After all, that most of this stuff will be out of date in 6 months, if not earlier (that is if this blog even exists by then). In J2ME Games Development
- actual processor speed will be different to that on your PC, leading you to think that your game is in better shape than it actually is
- you will not encounter errors related to exceeding the memory size of the device, either as far as the stack or permanent memory goes
These comments were reasonable a year ago, but I’m not quite so sure now. Sure, you can’t beat having the actual phone in your hand when testing – after all, you may need to rethink the way that the whole control set is put together when those little keys turn out to be too cumbersome for you to actually use your game. The graphics will also look completely different than on your nice, bright 17″ monitor. But surely, the landscape must be changing in respect to the other points – right?
The Netbeans mobility toolkit has some unreal stuff in it, that I was messing around with that tackles some of the issues that Wells raised:
- clock/processor speed can be configured on a bytecodes per second basis
- memory/permanent storage can be configured on a kilobyte basis
There are also heaps of things that you wouldn’t even have considered – display rate, network latency, package loss, bluetooth discovery times – you name it, they’ve got it. I’m well and truly impressed. The really coool thing is that you can manage multiple emulators using these settings too. I haven’t tried it, but will do later this week when I start to hook up some vendor sims to play Roadrun on (I was stoked when I found that my version ran pretty well on the various different sims on the mob pack :).
I’ve been collecting some developer links to the major vendors and am downloading SDKs as I write:
I hit the J2ME licensees page at Sun, and am disappointed that neither Matsushita (makers of the world’s greatest turntable – the Technics SL1200, and also my parent’s old National TV that after 15 years is still going strong in my brother’s room) nor Sagem (the dudes who made my phone, and apparently some satellite navigation systems or something) have developer sites – feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. Oh well, you develop against what you have, so I guess the big 3 it is. Can’t wait to have a play…
I get a bit emotional about the SL1200s – I sorely miss my decks now that I can’t have a good scratch on them. I just hope my beloved baby sister is putting them to good use. The world needs more girl DJs!