John Carmack's Cell Phone Adventures 109
Mr. Carmack has updated his blog with news of his latest interests. Apparently mobile gaming on cell phones has consumed a large portion of his time of late, and he has some witty commentary on programming for the emerging game platform. From the article: "I'm not a cell phone guy. I resisted getting one at all for years, and even now I rarely carry it. To a first approximation, I don't really like talking to most people, so I don't go out of my way to enable people to call me. However, a little while ago I misplaced the old phone I usually take to Armadillo, and my wife picked up a more modern one for me. It had a nice color screen and a bunch of bad java game demos on it. The bad java games did it."
That's gonna give the Java fanbois an aneurysm (Score:5, Interesting)
Heh - that should put the "Java is just as fast as native code" myth to rest. It won't, as people will claim that Just In Time compilation should solve it, but...
Even compiled to completely native code, Java semantic requirements like range checking on every array access hobble it. One of the phones (Motorola i730) has an option that does some load time compiling to improve performance, which does help a lot, but you have no idea what it is doing, and innocuous code changes can cause the compilable heuristic to fail.
Which ends that myth too.
Write-once-run-anywhere. Ha. Hahahahaha. We are only testing on four platforms right now, and not a single pair has the exact same quirks.
And there goes that Java myth, too...
Cell phones already have a very low latency digital data path - the circuit switched channel used for voice.
Actually - he's wrong. That channel has a good half-second or so latency. Try this - call up your home phone, and pick both up. Don't worry about feedback - there's way too much latency. Talk into your cellphone and listen to it "echo" on your phone. Or call up your friend on their cellphone and talk to each other, and listen to the good second between when they say something and you hear it.
It turns out that this latency isn't enough to prevent you from having a conversation, but there is quite a bit of latency on the voice connection of a cell phone.
Laugh if you want... (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked on a few cell phone games for SOE when I was working there, and all I have to say is that the sales figures make me want to be a cell phone gaming tycoon. It's not a pipe dream.
Re:That's gonna give the Java fanbois an aneurysm (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it just means that those myths don't apply on the Cell-phone platform. Thats not surprising, I doubt Cell Phones do JIT compiling, and their hardware is so different from PCs and each other, that you're stupid to think you aren't going to get away without testing.
And to reiterate, Java is nearly as fast as native code. Some of it's libraries aren't as fast as C equivalents though. I should know [sourceforge.net]
Still, Java is appropriate for those devices, since it allows the manufacturers to change their phones frequently without rewriting much software, and allows consumers to use the same software on multiple makes/models of phone.
Re:Bedeviled by Bejeweled (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's outsourced. (Score:5, Interesting)
Cell phone cpus are slow, and suck up the battery while they're working. But an entire chess board layout is very simple, and it wouldn't take much bandwidth to transmit your entire chess board layout to a remote computer which could then calculate the next move and transmit it back. (And that's assuming that the remote computer keeps no state information. If it kept track of the chess board itself, the bandwidth needed per move would just be a few bytes.)
I could see a cell phone company buying Deep Blue [ibm.com] or some similar big honking box and reprogramming it to play lots of games at once. Then release a chess application for cell phones that uses the data capability to allow you to play chess `against Deep Blue.'
Sure, Deep Blue would not be playing 1000 simultaneous world-class chess games (though for an extra fee, you could get more cpu dedicated to you giving you a better opponnent), but it could probably beat most people. (The only reason to use Deep Blue itself is for the name recognition. A number of racks of PCs would work too, but it wouldn't have the obvious marketing potential.)
This is one case where having a remote server do most of the work makes perfect sense. (Having a PC play chess with a remote server doing the work makes less sense, as a PC has much more cpu to work with, so it's not as needed.)
Re:That's gonna give the Java fanbois an aneurysm (Score:3, Interesting)
So not only do you need Java for your cross platform compatibility that is so very nessecary on mobile phone programming, but you need the JVM's enforced behavior checks so you don't run up a rather large bill on behalf of your paying users. It's very unlikely that a small gaming company can afford to defend its "NO GUARENTEES OF USABILITY FOR ANY KIND AND WE'RE TOTALLY NOT LIABLE IF THIS COSTS YOU A FORTUNE IN FEES" disclaimer in their EULA when that buffer check SHOULD have been implemented. Java provides them with a fairly strong guarentee that their buffers are safe, and that even if something else happens, you should be effectively quarantined from networking functionality. Ultimately, John Carmack is dissapointed, but writing games is probably a waste of his skills versus writing the JVM itself.
Re:Armadillo = Amarillo? (Score:2, Interesting)
try symbain phones then... midp sucks!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Will John be able to change things? (Score:2, Interesting)
What if he follows through on this attempt to make a cell phone game and does what he's done in the past with PC gaming? That is, pick the best, fastest hardware available at the time and then develop something that requires specs a LITTLE better than what's available to be really playable.
Let's suppose he finds a phone with a good, "fast" Java implementation, with a decent amount of memory, and targets his game for that minimum spec. Once the game is released, will we suddenly see a shift in cell phone performance? As every Doom fanboi wants the game and dumps their current lame phone and provider for whoever supports/carries a phone good enough to run MobileDoomRPG.
Will John Carmack be able to redefine the performance expectations of the cell phone industry? Will DoomRPG Capable(tm) become a new standard?
I certainly hope so. If the state of the industry is as bad as some have indicated in this thread, there needs to be a compelling reason to get performance beyond "good enough".
- Jasen.