Just in case you miss these, there are some great promo and blog videos here (make sure you're on broadband, obviously). Plenty of 3rd edition device clues, with seemingly the whole of the N-Gage game back catalogue about to be available on all 3rd edition smartphones. Plenty of sequences involving over-the-air trials and purchase, multi-player gaming, and so on. Set aside an hour and have fun watching.
Read on in the full article.
Something does not compute here for me, and maybe some Symbian pro knows the answer.
slitchfield, you say that seemingly the whole of the N-Gage game back catalogue is about to be available on all 3rd edition smartphones. One would think that given the number of games and the number of companies making them involved this is only feasible if the games run just like that on those phones, without recompile or even changes in the source code.
Now, the message to us programmers about Symbian 9 which runs on the 3rd edition devices is that it breaks binary compatibility with earlier Symbian versions for all applications.
As far as I know N-Gage games are Symbian programs, in principle, and so far running on pre-OS 9 devices. That's why here I arrive at a contradiction: How come all games "are about to be available" if Symbian 9 requires at least a recompile?
Was Nokia a little creative with a claim and really meant to say "Most (but not all) games will become available quickly", or is there some special compatibility mode in OS 9 for those N-Gage games (that is not available to us mere mortal Symbian application programmers...)?
No they will have to recompile them. However bear in mind games are often a bit different to applications and may not need so much work. (i.e. they may need to port a game engine, and some gui stuff). Relatively speaking this could happen very quickly and cheaply compared to the orginal development. Nokia have been working on this for some time (up to a year or more), and so they have had time to do this.
How much of the catlog is available remains to be seem, but I woul expect a lot of the recent games to make it , but perhaps not all of the older releases. e.g. In the video you see mentions of games such as High Seize and Atari Classic, both of these are released original N-Gage classic games.
I'm not an expert on that topic, but I guess you are correct. Game applications draw directly to the screen using quite low-level code, might be that they don't need any porting and just re-compile.
Games are _different_ from regular apps, but not necessarily simpler to port. It depends on a lot of different things, but porting to Symbian 9 is never as easy as just recompiling the code.
"Games are _different_ from regular apps, but not necessarily simpler to port. It depends on a lot of different things, but porting to Symbian 9 is never as easy as just recompiling the code."
I don't think that's totally fair, there are lots of things on games that won't need any work at all (for example textures, level design, video and audio clips etc).
The only thing that needs working on is the game engine, but experience shows that it doesn't seem to be that much of a problem. Many third-party N-Gage games have been ported to completely different non-symbian systems without too much trouble (for example Asphalt was later ported to the Nintendo DS, and FIFA 2005 was later ported to the ill-fated, tiny-selling Gizmondo).
They have a year to do this, and I'm sure Nokia would be willing to put up the money to create an instant back catalogue from day one, especially of those games which got good reviews (i.e. we might not be seeing Puyo Pop make a comeback 😉 ).
By the time Nokia makes N-Gage titles available for S60 3rd edition phones few people will be interested in playing them. Nice try Nokia!
I can see a "mophun" style engine on the horizon.
krisse: I agree with everything you say. However, there are lots of things in regular apps that don't need any work either. So I don't think it's fair to say that it's easier to port games than other types apps.