New mobile game.

Many thanks to those who have signed up so far. We could still use some more though.

Thanks Darksaviour69. A few Sony Ericssons or Motorolas would be great.

I don’t think there are too many popular Sharps, Toshibas or Samsungs capable of running the game so I will test them last – best to get the common European models done first.

I have had loads of sign ups with nokia 6680s and 6630s. Funny thing is that I have both those phones myself and once you get a game running on one nokia series 60 phone the minor differences between phones in the series are pretty easy to accommodate as my game automatically scales to the screen resolution of the phone.

Hi paddy. I don’t have an N72 myself but pretty sure it will as the N72 is a series 60 phone and thats my primary target platform. If it doesn’t I will have to make it work!

Just to be clear as I have had a couple of people asking when they would get to play it, it is still in development and about two weeks away before I will be sending out a very early version. That version will most likely just have one track, one car and no multiplayer. The main aim of that round of testing will be for me to see what handsets the game engine runs well on and identify what handsets it doesn’t and why.

Be prepared for some serious pain with trying to run that on Motorolas though.[/quote:97d4db848d]
Hi pkelly83 thanks for comment. Most motorolas do have a small heap size but some models like RAZR_V3x should be able to cope. I will just have to use every trick I can find to control memory allocation.

Hi guys. Finally got round to getting the first alpha out (Been working on other projects and playing too much with my new GP2X which rocks by the way :D) .
I still need to do a tonne of work on the car physics though. I was using much of Marco Monster’s physics code originally but took it out to get verlet collisions working. If anyone has any tips on how to apply realistic driving controls to a 2d verlet system I am all ears.

Anyway hope the game at least loads for those who volunteered. Looking forward to some feedback.

Hi Kuci06. Thanks for feedback. Sorry you had to use an emulator, I thought I had the Sony Ericsson softkeys mapped right but obviously not :oops:
That was a clanger on my part so I will get that sorted tomorrow.
Yeah the car physics are not done at all and are just about functional enough to let people see part of the level. Thanks again.

Hey guys. May be in a position to hire another freelance coder shortly to help out with this game.
If anyone here would be interested and has a good level of java/j2me or knows a thing or two about how to code driving games PM me.

Put together a video of how the game is progressing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4HzUtuIu2I

Still have work to do on car handling (balancing control responsiveness, sliding, power steer and being able to corner sharp turns is taking time).
Will get back to testers when I get that smoothed out.

looks cool..[/quote:17e042874a]
Thanks Peter, high praise seeing as what you guys are up to.

Hope Glu mobile (iFone) are working on Sega Rally for mobile. They have had rights since 05 I believe. Love to see how they handle track deformation. :)

Looks great!, Keep up the good work. Yep the camera needs to turn with the car a bit more[/quote:17e042874a]
You could be on to something there kyotokid. I am just to close this thing to spot stuff like that. Cornering would be easier if you see round the corner more.

Good answer Peter. :lol:
Mobile 3d chips were meant to main stream for ages now. Maybe mobiles can do what psp can now and let ps3 do all the work over the air. (Just send input from mobile and get images back from ps3).

Of course I have enough trouble programming as it is :roll: and cell programming would most likely do my nut in.

BTW kyotokid, when are the mini games and what I suspect is rc rally car you can drive going to be ready to mess with on evos.net
The coming soon is just taunting me! If you know who is doing the website make sure they know those two sections are the most important!

Thanks Mal!

Hi again pKelly83. I am told opengl es performs better than jsr-184 (M3g) on most mobiles but from the java examples of both api’s I have run not sure if the gap is as wide as reported. And with M3g 2 being released soon hardware acceleration should be better supported.

Open gl es of course has more functionality and would be more familiar to many here but M3g is a neat high level api that is easier to get to grips with.

Symbian / brew apps are naturally more efficient than java also. But games reviewers on the major sites are aware of this and do take it into account when contrasting games coded for different platforms.

In regard to 2d drawing over the 3d scene yes you can and I use it. It does affect performance to do so but alternative of using 3d sprites for interface proved problematic for me. You can actually render the 3d scene as an image rather than direct to screen for use as a texture if you wanted – some good effects can be achieved this way.

If you are looking for specific figures the jBenchmark site is the best resource for per device frame rates and such.
http://www.jbenchmark.com/result.jsp?benchmark=3d

Nokia N93 and N95 top the list – super phones. If nokia are listening and would like to send me an N95 it would be graciously received. :wink:

I think I will be writing a full postmortem of my game when done so I will try and put some performance detail in that.

Hi Paul. I will try and give as much detail as I can in postmortem but since you asked:

Each car texture is 128×128 as well as some scenery but most are 64×64 and some small items are 32 by 32 or less. I am used to pixel art and getting detail into small textures.

Jamaican Limbo Levels on the poly count too. Its all very like early Playstation stuff.

Red car in vid: Our survey says… (aka blender) Car body (Wheels not included) 135 verts, 193 faces (Think that’s tri’s as I am not using quads). For newer cars I am going wild with 245 verts each. Most other stuff in scene are planes or partial cubes. 60 odd unique meshes in that video. Approaching 300 clones.

As for different builds same models some of the 128×128 textures will have to be smaller to fit heap on lower spec phones and draw distance may have to be reduced to get nice frame rate – currently for Nokias no pop up thanks to loading new scenery as you go round corners.