What’s the best game in the Ovi Store? Nokia asked last week with ten games to choose from, and the result are available. But in a lovely nod to their ability to spot a top game, the write-in "others" category provided the runaway winner with 36% of the vote. The winning garland has been placed on Angry Birds, available for the N900. Which isn’t that surprising given that (a) it’s a runaway hit on the iPhone and (b) the N900 version sold six times as fast as the iPhone version!
Read on in the full article.
Great to see the success of the Maemo version but just think what things might have been like had the developer not decided to ignore the vastly greater installed user base of Symbian!
Quite why this game hasn't received a Symbian port is beyond me.
Just another example of dev's following the herd and ignoring the majority of end users.
Therefore, my Ovi Game Of The Year Award goes to A Big Roll In Paradise 😊
I think Angry Birds will come loaded on N8. You can spot it a few times in the videos.
The reason for this is that Angry Birds requires a hardware accellerated device, unfortunately the Nokia 5800, N97, X6 etc, do not have hardware graphics accelleration.
It would be too timeconsuming (and expensive) to rewrite all the graphics code to run on non-accelerated hardware.
The N900 and the coming Symbian^3 N8 has OpenGL 2.0 hardware accelleration making it super easy to port an iPhone to them.
(Actually, Symbian^1 devices like the SE Satio and Vivaz also have OpenGL 2.0 hardware accelleration..)
/Henrik...
"lovesign:
Great to see the success of the Maemo version but just think what things might have been like had the developer not decided to ignore the vastly greater installed user base of Symbian!
Quite why this game hasn't received a Symbian port is beyond me.
Just another example of dev's following the herd and ignoring the majority of end users.
Therefore, my Ovi Game Of The Year Award goes to A Big Roll In Paradise 😊"
There's allready a S^3 (or actually QT) version of Angry Birds. You can see it running on N8 in this video:
youtube.com/watch?v=DgJQa9c7H7g&feature=player_embedded#!
Around 1:25 in video.
"Which isn�t that surprising given that (a) it�s a runaway hit on the iPhone and (b) the N900 version sold six times as fast as the iPhone version!
That surprising statistic is even more amazing when you think of the respective sizes of the iPhone installed base compared to the N900"
To be fair Ewan Angry Birds on the iPhone Platform has A LOT more competition from other, quality games than the N900 does, typical AAN bias imo.
And where exactly is the bias? He is just stating two facts.
Everyone knows that the N900 has less games and less competition.
Unregistered wrote:
It would be too timeconsuming (and expensive) to rewrite all the graphics code to run on non-accelerated hardware.
Not so (IMHO). There are (were) off-the-shelf (even free) s/w implementations of OpenGL ES available that work "just fine" on non-accelerated Symbian phones - no extra development effort required. I was involved in the development of such an application[1] and it was available for S60 2nd Edition phones as well as S60 3rd Edition, h/w acceleration or not. Only the N93 and N95 were accelerated at the time - my primary development phone was a lowly Nokia 3250.
No, I suspect the issue is that s/w OpenGL ES just isn't 'fast enough' in their case - or perhaps there's some other marketing reason.
[1] Cinema3D. It's hard to find now, but there are some copies
here which you can try if you have such a phone - I only ported it to S60/2nd, S60/3rd, and S60/3rd FP1, so I don't know it will work on FP2 and I doubt 5th will work.
S60 devices have come with built-in OpenGL ES APIs since Series 60 v2.6 (S60 2nd Edition, Feature Pack 2). The Nokia 6630 has the first version using this S60 version, and it had an "almost working" OpenGL ES v1.0 implementation.
Since then, it was upgraded to OpenGL ES v1.1. However, when the device do not have 3D graphics hardware acceleration, then the implementation is a pure software library.
With careful optimization, the OpenGL ES software rendering works, but is far from the experience on devices with GPU.
Many (most?) native 3D games on non-accelerated hardware usually perform better with custom 3D libraries, than the software OpenGL ES. That, of course, adds the burden of maintaining and porting such custom 3D engines to new platforms, whereas going with a standard implementation saves you from the trouble. E.g., the "new" N-Gage devices had 3D games, but none of them used OpenGL ES, but custom libraries, as the N-Gage SDK has no OpenGL ES support, and most of the N-Gage compatible models lacked also the hardware and games were supposed to work (and did) on all compatible devices without any modifications and from the same installation files/binaries.
And as mentioned, the TI OMAP2420 based devices from Nokia did have OpenGL ES hw support (N93, N93i, E90, N95, N95 8GB, N82). All still OpenGL ES v1.1. And, also as mentioned, N8 is the first Nokia Symbian device with OpenGL ES v2.0.
N/A wrote:S60 devices have come with built-in OpenGL ES APIs since Series 60 v2.6 (S60 2nd Edition, Feature Pack 2). The Nokia 6630 has the first version using this S60 version, and it had an "almost working" OpenGL ES v1.0 implementation. Since then, it was upgraded to OpenGL ES v1.1. However, when the device do not have 3D graphics hardware acceleration, then the implementation is a pure software library.
With careful optimization, the OpenGL ES software rendering works, but is far from the experience on devices with GPU.
I'm fairly sure that's pretty much what I wrote, though with more words. S/W worked just fine for us, though our app isn't particularly taxing, graphics-wise.
IIRC, we did ship with an OpenGL ES library on non-accelerated h/w.
You mention that differing s/w GL solutions can need different customisations, but you don't mention s/w workarounds are sometimes also needed for the differing h/w solutions. Furthermore, s/w GL solutions are more easily fixed (well, it's at least possible), while we're pretty much stuck with problems in h/w.
So, in other words, based on your own discussion, I guess that pretty much proved my point as to why Angry Birds (and others) are not ported non-accelerated devices 😉
Unregistered wrote:So, in other words, based on your own discussion, I guess that pretty much proved my point as to why Angry Birds (and others) are not ported non-accelerated devices 😉
"In other words" that are totally different to mine...sure.
IMO, it is NOT 'too timeconsuming (and expensive) to rewrite all the graphics code' since, in my experience, it's not necessary to spend any effort on that at all (just packaging effort).
No, IMO, it's all about the performance .... ie performance of s/w OpenGL ES isn't fast enough.
That's why a viable solution, eg. writing an optimized software renderer or rewriting large parts of the game to obtain good performance on the non-accelerated devices is neccessary and hence a fair amount of work and time (and money).
On a related note I just noticed that two new expansion packs for Angry Birds has shown up in the Ovi store (yay!). Maybe Rovio has been inspired by the poll results.
Anyway, excuse me. I dont have time to sit here and type. I've got a lot of green pigs to squash...
The only thing about Angry Birds that might place high demand on graphics is the horizontal scrolling of the entire screen. Otherwise it's just a few sprites. However, using the s/w OpenGL is likely to put you up against the memory limitations of some of the Symbian touch devices from the last 2 years.
iFanboy, do you ever miss an opportunity to make a fool of yourself?
I still do hope Angry Birds and some other games will be ported to non-hardware accellerated Symbian^1 devices, as some developers has shown that it is possible to create visually impressive games on these devices.
Take a look at Creebies, The Big Roll which are great looking 3D games.
Symbian^1 phones like 5800, X6 etc, are also very popular, so the possible sales may justify the extra effort and resources to reprogram the codes of the game.