The world's first ever mobile phone MMORPG, TibiaME, has just received an update to its graphics engine, and a whole new Halloween-themed island has been added to the game world. In a special feature, All About Symbian takes a look at the updated S60 3rd Edition version of the game, which is compatible with all Next Gen N-Gage phones.
Read on in the full article.
The fixed 176*208 size is a showstopper for many - particularly for people on other MIDlet-capable platforms having even (W)VGA screens (for example, desktop PC's or (W)VGA Pocket PC's). This is particularly true of high-res PC's - it's quite a letdown to having to play a 176*208 game on a PC screen (even magnified) instead of a correctly scaled one.
Is it THAT hard to implement dynamic scaling? I seriously doubt this as there're several MIDlets that do dynamic scaling. (I've also listed several of them in my Windows Mobile / Symbian MIDlet Bible).
The fixed 176*208 size is a showstopper for many
I agree, and I told the developers this.
The problem I think is that they're trying to serve a mass market here, where most people's phones are Java-based with low resolution screens, so that's what they're concentrating on.
However, like you say even Java-based phones are becoming high resolution, with cheap models like the 5300 featuring QVGA screens.
Is it THAT hard to implement dynamic scaling?
...but then it would look very ugly if you have giant pixels on a large screen (for example on the N95 8GB).
I think it might actually be better with TibiaME for S60 if they used the extra screen space to display all those multiple menus at once. At the moment, you have to press a button to switch from map to armour to bag to people online etc. A QVGA screen easily has enough space to display all of these status screens simultaneously along with the main game screen.
krisse wrote:...but then it would look very ugly if you have giant pixels on a large screen (for example on the N95 8GB).I think it might actually be better with TibiaME for S60 if they used the extra screen space to display all those multiple menus at once. At the moment, you have to press a button to switch from map to armour to bag to people online etc. A QVGA screen easily has enough space to display all of these status screens simultaneously along with the main game screen.
Or, they could display more of the map, while leaving the GUI at its current size - most auto-scaler MIDlet games do the same. That is, IMHO, it'd be, programmatically, pretty easy to mod the code to allow for scaling.
You mean map as in playing area?
That could cause technical problems on 2G phones because this is an online realtime game rather than an offline or turn-based game.
If the visible playing area is extended and the player is in a busy part of the game (for example the main marketplace on the main island) there may be problems with latency as there would be so many things that need constant updating.
krisse wrote:You mean map as in playing area?That could cause technical problems on 2G phones because this is an online realtime game rather than an offline or turn-based game.
If the visible playing area is extended and the player is in a busy part of the game (for example the main marketplace on the main island) there may be problems with latency as there would be so many things that need constant updating.
Yup, but I still don't think the GPRS speed would cause any bottlenecks - after all, the (proprietary) communications protocols in multiplayer games are designed to be as data usage-friendly as possible. I don't think even a VGA device (with a huge map & a lot of stuff going on) would suffer any problem because of the lack of bandwidth. That is, I don't think the latency would seriously grow because of the GPRS being too slow - probably only because of the limited computation power of the given MIDlet manager, if at all. (However, current MIDlet Managers are pretty fast, so, RPG's like these wouldn't suffer much from being scaled to even a VGA device either.)
Taking this discussion further, a MIDlet like this, when properly scaled to at least QVGA, would be not only successful on "dumbphones" / Symbian, but also Windows Mobile. The latter severely lacks any real MMORPG titles - there are very few of them (Shadow of the Legend, the Russian-language Sphere, the pretty much deserted and hard-to-run Wyvern and some mud clones). (If interested, see http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/menneisyys/102005MPPPCGames.asp for a complete overview of MP WinMob games; Sphere is discussed at http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=661&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1 .)