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    • #4478
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Hi Guys,
      I’m going into my final year and I’ve started working on my final year project which is going to be a game for mobile phone. Basically what I need to know is what I need to do this. I’ve done quiet a bit of googling and gathering of info but very little concrete “this is what you need to know”.

      My concept is to have a 3d game that can connect to say a centrel server for the propose sending stats and recieving updates. There the broad strokes anyway.

      Any input would be great, thanks.

    • #23943
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Hey,

      You’ve prob. already seen these but have a look at these see whatcha think:

      http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/3D/index.jsp
      http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,8764,5400,00.html
      http://www.khronos.org/opengles/

      also the developers section on nokia has good stuff, with regards to emulators, and comms with servers and such like

      SDK spec. for sony/ericsson
      http://developer.sonyericsson.com/site/global/docstools/java/p_java.jsp

    • #23946
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Thanks for that. Now imagine I’m starting from the groud, how good does my knowledge of java need to be? J2ME worth it or should I be looking at some of the other mobile languages out there? 3d modelling what do I need because I’ve no experience at all with in that department? Netbeans is there any decent alternative to netbeans!

    • #23951
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      I would suggest sticking with J2ME as the support seems pretty good and it doesn’t look too bad in terms of implementing an interface with the 3D api.

      Take a look at the Developers Guidelines for J2ME on the sony/ericsson sdk page just under ‘Technical docs & Training’. In the getting started section 3/4’s of the way down this doc there is a section describing getting a 3d app working, have a look at it and it should give you an idea of the java level required.

    • #23952
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Thanks for that. Now imagine I’m starting from the groud, how good does my knowledge of java need to be? J2ME worth it or should I be looking at some of the other mobile languages out there? 3d modelling what do I need because I’ve no experience at all with in that department? Netbeans is there any decent alternative to netbeans![/quote:037837fcc8]

      Right.. Having a good bit of java experience (and some j2me) i can help you with this one..

      1. you need to be fairly good with java to create decent j2me stuff. So i suggest learning java first to a certain level. Be comfortable with graphics 2d, if you dont know this you need to learn it, alot of j2me uses this.

      2. j2me is pretty slow but easier to find phones which support it. Brew looks like its a decent api but few phones around with it so you would be running alot of your code only in brew emulators. at least with j2me you can give it to people after you’ve tested it in an emulator. Although brew is harder as its c++ based. brews website i think is qualcomm.com

      3. as for 3d modelling with j2me, you might be a bit ambitious, the memory for j2me games are limited so thats probably out. Although brew does allow animations\models, take alook at spiderman for smart phones. ;)

      4. best ide for java in my opinion is definately IBM Eclipse. Its free, its easy to learn to use and the plugins are fantastic for it. Also its free!! Alot of professional java teams use this as their dev tool.Alot of people are also using eclipse to interface with gcc.
      http://www.eclipse.org

      You’ll also notice that eclipse while written in java itself is far faster than other java ide’s (forte,netbeans etc), because eclipse uses an ibm patent called SWT (standard widget toolkit), which basically uses native gui code calls thus boosting the speed of the application. Also you can incorporate SWT into your own java projects instead of java swing\awt.

      Finally, your not going to make anything astounding with j2me because its slow and little memory is available to do anything cool. Although if you can develop a really playable game using it, you could be onto a winner. As far as ive seen i havent seen a good j2me game yet. Most are inhibited by crap 8,4,6,2 controls..

    • #23953
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Thanks for that. I was aware of the limitations in particular with sound, concurrency is going to be a big issue to resolve along with everything else. The one thing I’m really curious about however is creating models

    • #23973
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      The Programming fourm is more suited to this sort of stuff, not just because of relevancy, but because there are already a few topics already there you may want to look at such as:
      http://www.gamedevelopers.ie/forums/viewtopic.php?t=438 -Includes links to varous tutorials and references (some from me!)
      http://www.gamedevelopers.ie/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1507 -Open source J2ME game released
      http://www.gamedevelopers.ie/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1253 -If you want to pay some money and take a shortcut.

      The fourm is at http://www.gamedevelopers.ie/forums/viewforum.php?f=14 so you may want to check there for any more topics of interest.

    • #23976
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Having done my final year project in J2ME (a phone game, still adding the bells and whistles at the moment), i would suggest getting your hands on all the J2ME specific tutorials you can, and pick a device ASAP, as there can be as much to learn about device specific APIs (like the Full screen canvas for nokias) as J2ME itself.

      I wouldn’t bother with J2SE tutorials (or Java tutorials) as there are a lot of concepts that you need to forget about when coding in J2ME, like OO for example (as the more classes you create, the more heap memory you use…which limits what you can assign to your game engine)

      J2ME is all about efficiency on a very resource limited device, don’t forget that you’ll have to code the UI aswell as the game (which is a pain in the arse), as the UI is just as important for mobile devices, but again takes up memory on you.

      In terms of phones

      It all adds up – code, images, sounds all have to be kept to a minimum.

      Also, there are a lot of things in the J2SE API that don’t exist in J2ME one, i found this out by first prototyping any ideas i had in J2SE…then found i couldn’t port them directly, a lot of work was required.

      I think i still have a big document of all the warnings and things to look out for, i’ll scrounge through my old notes and pass them on…but given my “filing system” i can’t promise you anything!

      if you want to really slay them with your project, make sure you can put your project on a real phone and NOT an emulator.

      be aware of emulator issues too, i had problems with writing game records (high scores etc) on a nokia 6600 emulator, and spent ages trying to fix my code…only to find out that there’s a flaw with some emulators.

      In terms of toolkits etc, i’d recommend Nokia above all the others, Motorola emulators give very poor error feedback – i’ve had trouble with apps not running but it just says “an error occurred” and crashes.

      SE are decent but very slow, and they are very stingey with the information and tutorials, also if you are planning any sort of networking between phones etc SE won’t let you simulate that unless you actually own two of their phones…i tried to develop a Bluetooth two player game only to find you have to physically have the two phones infront of you to test it.

      The Nokia toolkit lets you simulate networking.

      And stay away from Siemens too…there’s a reason they are trying to find someone to buy and take over their mobile phone production! :lol:

    • #23980
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Very helpful sound.

    • #23987
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      No bother, if you’ve any more questions or whatever, give us a mail/PM.

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