Hello all,
My name is Jacco Bikker, I am the author of 'Resistance' (work in progress, check http://overloaded.pocketmatrix.com/shots.jpg for some ingame shots) and I work for Overloaded, a Dutch company that creates and distributes games for mobile devices.
To increase the amount of stuff to distribute we actively support the mobile games coding community. We did so on the PocketPC by releasing a game coding library, called EasyCE, sources included, wich is currently being used by the majority of PocketPC games (at least partially). Right now, we're porting this to Symbian.
Basically, this library takes the pain out of Symbian coding by offering the programmer a framework for full-screen games with direct screen access as well as convenient classes for sprites, audio (4-channel mixer included), file loading (.tga), common ANSI c-stuff (fopen, char*, no more nasty 'descriptors'😉 and so on. Basically, anyone who knows what mode 13h is can program using our library.
We plan to release this in the coming week. My question is: Is there a demand for such a library, is there a coding community, what else would you need to get motivated to code for Symbian, and how many coders can supply us with good games to distribute? 😊
Greets
Jacco Bikker, a.k.a. "The Phantom",
Overloaded - http://www.overloaded.com and http://overloaded.pocketmatrix.com[/img]
It's always interesting to see how other people solved some issues.
i'm developing a library like that myself but i have some problems when it's running on the real phone, but it works good in the emu though.
We tried to bypass the emu, since it takes so long to start it; right now we are able to compile one set of sources for windows and Symbian. The windows version runs in a window with a nice 7650 skin. It starts just as fast as a regular win9x app (instantly, on my system), and it debugs as easy as a regular app too.
BTW, I found working with the SDK highly anoying, because of the files that are created all over the drive (including in the SDK dir) and the very unclear set of perl scripts, batch files, prebuild steps and so on. Right now, using our library you basically create a new project by copying a template directory. Your project directory contains everything that you need if you want to distribute the thing, wich is also handy for version control.
And, I don't know how other people feel about the Symbian specific versions of files, windows and especially those weird descriptors, but I don't like them. 😊 So, your game code that uses the library is free of that. That's also why we can compile it to win9x so easily (and PocketPC / Smartphone, for that matter).
Phantomus,
Put it simply, there aren;t a lot of coders yet for Symbian OS because it's not that well known, especially in the states. If you release the library, there's a good chance it will be snapped up and you'd be pivotal in developing a base of programmers doing exciting things with the Symbian OS.
I'd release it, help the few people who'll show an initial interest (Switchblade may be one, he's asked in the past for a lot of things you seem to have included) and hopefully that momentum will snowball.
We're very geeky at the moment us developers - that will change soon with the expected numbers of Series 60 devices this year (estimates are 15 MILLION units being shipped) and thats a lot more than ALL the Pocket PC's combined.
I noticed someone mentioned in another thread that the gameboy emu bypasses the system and draws directly to the screen. How 'directly' is this, and does anyone know if the phone functions will still work if you 'take over' like this? I would gladly own the device while 'my' game is playing, but I don't think that every user would like such 'exclusivity'. 😊 Are there any technical docs at this level?
get the gameboy emulator source here:
http://www.wildpalm.co.uk/GoBoy7650.html
there is no launcher-app included in the sources, but that shouldn't be that hard to code 😊
Jacco:
there's a paper about direct-screen access on symbian page. It describes currently used techniques + presents a new one.
Everything works well if your app listens to messages like gain/lose focus.
PS.here's direct link to paper mentioned above:
http://www.symbian.com/developer/techlib/papers/dsa/direct_screen_access.pdf
Thanks a lot! I'll give it a thorough read.
is there a coding community
Since I'd like to start programming for the Series60 I am creating a dutch site/forum dedicated to developing software for the Series60 devices. Hopefully it will grow out to be a nice community 😉
www.series60.tk should get u there, but the forum still doesnt work as I am facing some damn problems which need to be solved first :evil: (the posts that are on the forum are testposts which I added using access, posting through the site doesnt work yet)
that would be nice except that i dont speak dutch, how about keeping it english so we all can understand with one of the forums in dutch?
otherwise i'll keep hanging around on this one 😊
There's a lot of english fora on the subject but (allmost) no dutch ones. Besides, the site is set up on a free account with bandwidth limits so it couldnt stand too much traffic. Making it english would mean more visitors.
But hey, this forum isnt that bad! 😃 And when there's been 3 visitors a month Ill think about turning it english 😉
One of the best things I have heard in a looong time..
Symbian really have screwed up the potential development oppurtunities by bad documentation and preferential distribution of header files.
Hopefully this will help solve a lot of problems for the game development community. And maybe your resources can help other sorts of development.. (I voted 'Will contribute to library', hoping to help even general app developer use a modified library or so i think)
Thanks a lot for you effort.