{"id":958,"date":"2010-02-25T17:43:12","date_gmt":"2010-02-25T17:43:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chocobeam.me\/playground\/2010\/02\/platform-of-choice-status-its-complicated\/"},"modified":"2010-02-25T17:43:12","modified_gmt":"2010-02-25T17:43:12","slug":"platform-of-choice-status-its-complicated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2010\/02\/platform-of-choice-status-its-complicated\/","title":{"rendered":"Platform of choice status: it’s complicated"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

I have a dream, it\u2019s a game. I have the concept, the audio part prototyped with input. It\u2019s a game for multi-touch screens and nothing else.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll see how behind being a [insert your brand\/philosophy] fan, sometimes it\u2019s not as easy as it seems when creating games and applications to choose a platform.<\/p>\n

So from the start it\u2019s pretty easy. Target: smart phones with touch screens. But then:<\/p>\n

\"Dev<\/a> <\/p>\n

It gets messy.<\/p>\n

Each point is important though the multi-touch and audio lib are obligatory ones: the gameplay relies on multiple input points and all the audio feedback is powered by the crazy awesome Fmod<\/a> audio lib, which I feed with Fmod Designer. I\u2019m still trying to figure out how to do the same as this tool does without it but it makes it so easy and perfectly well that I\u2019m already discouraged. And not audio programmer enough to code my own engine. I can\u2019t reinvent the wheel and maybe that\u2019s a good thing. Firelight Technologies, creators of Fmod are doing it for 8 years now, making it better. I want to use their experience.<\/p>\n

Performance\/feasibility is virtually green for everyone but Android is changing so fast and by using the Java machine, it can be smooth, it can be awful. For extensive and advanced audio use Java is not that much recommended to say the least. On MS side well the new line of phones starts with high specs so it should be ok. <\/p>\n

Ease of dev is critical. It provides the iteration loop, the faster you see what\u2019s happening in the end-user scenario, the better. Apple is hard. Dealing with provisioning profiles, phone IDs and shit like that almost made me regret the buggy Nintendo DS tools. Also, Objective C. Also, iTunes and XCode. Awful. Android seems painful too and it\u2019s hard to tell if it\u2019s really easy, but in any case it\u2019s getting better (NDK, Python\/Lua bindings). Microsoft is marked as green because all we know is that the dev on Windows Phone 7 is going to be powered with XNA\/Silverlight, both already used and tested for years. And yeah, they are easy and productive tools. Still, for the audio part Fmod is way ahead, but could be ported on MS phones easily I guess. <\/p>\n

Freedom of content. Well Apple said it all last week<\/a>. Let\u2019s see if the competition is going to behave as sheep or not. They know this freedom is a big argument in their favors so I don\u2019t think they\u2019re going to.<\/p>\n

Freedom of distribution. Well Apple said it all last week<\/a>. Let\u2019s see if the competition is going to behave as sheep or not. They know this freedom is a big argument in their favors so I don\u2019t think they\u2019re going to. Though, Microsoft is luring on this closed business model (ZuneHD apps). Please MS, don\u2019t. I know you love to screw things up at the very end but please hold on to yourself on this one.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So basically for now I\u2019m fucked even if my game idea is ready to live for real (so frustrating to play it with the mouse!!). I could change the input of my game but it would not be the same at all. Try to switch the audio lib but it\u2019s not getting me anywhere, I\u2019m relying on it so bad. I could still do a full prototype on the iPhone but I don\u2019t own one\/can\u2019t develop on and I don\u2019t want to have something that works and not being able to release it or worse, make it ship it and die unknown, between two farting apps.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s really frustrating. When Warren Spector is talking about how we so need the equivalent of camera and theatre screen, it\u2019s not about copying the movie industry. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s about letting creators fulfill their ideas faster than once every two or three years at best<\/em>. In 2010, it\u2019s still a dream.<\/p>\n

Sigh.<\/p>\n

EDIT: by writing this post, I just found that someone has made Fmod available for Java<\/a>, which means I could prototype, release and do my shit on Android. Maybe not (is it going to work perfectly as in C\/C++? Way to make it native on Android?) but it reopens the problem! <\/p>\n

Damn I love the internet. And the Open Source :-)<\/p>\n

EDIT2: Shit, I just thought about it: a lot of Android phones don\u2019t have the FPU unit needed by Fmod..What happens if I call the lib on the phone? Atrocious performance?<\/p>\n

Welcome to one of my world.<\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a dream, it\u2019s a game. I have the concept, the audio part prototyped with input. It\u2019s a game for multi-touch screens and nothing else. You\u2019ll see how behind being a [insert your brand\/philosophy] fan, sometimes it\u2019s not as easy as it seems when creating games and applications to choose a platform. So from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}