Game Devs Weigh In On Windows Phone 7 189
The mobile games industry has exploded over the past few years, driven largely by titles built for iOS and Android. The Guardian's games blog decided to investigate the pros and cons of Windows Phone 7 as a game development platform while it struggles to catch up to its predecessors.
"... the easy portability of code between WP7 and Xbox, plus the wealth of online tutorials, libraries and community support, is a massive advantage, especially for smaller and less experienced teams. ... As with Xbox Live Arcade, the console's downloadable games service, Windows Phone 7 offers a curated experience, which means Microsoft controls the quality of games appearing on the device. ... [Steven Batchelor-Manning of Nerf Games says,] 'The App Hub offers a good peer review system, where other developers are asked to check over your game. This helps filter out both low quality and bug-ridden titles. We are always given a particular quality to aim for. Once it's got past this stage there is also a chance that Microsoft will veto against your game going on the platform. Ultimately, this prevents the market being swamped, but above this, there seems to be a layer of games by big publishers (EA, etc) that just step past the smaller developers in the queue. This is the biggest drawback of the system.'"
Astroturfing (Score:0, Insightful)
So many Win7 stories.
So many positive Win7 comments.
Please ./ moderators (below I don't know, 180,000?), MODERATE!
Seems they have no idea what they are talking abou (Score:4, Insightful)
... the easy portability of code between WP7 and Xbox,
How come i get the feeling they have NEVER programmed at all?
All against MS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Slightly off-topic
Recently there had been several stories about MS / WP7 and many comments are, kind of knee-jerk reactions against MS.
Before someone screams astroturfing, let me say that I use whatever tool is right for the job. Mostly I do data-driven applications (WinForms, PHP, MVC, Java, whatever) against the database server that will deliver the most bang for the buck (my client's buck, not mine) so I have used Firebird (the OS incarnation of Paradox), SqlLite, MySQL, Postgress, MS SQL and (gasp!) even Oracle!
Now, I don't think MS gets, even now, how that works. Calling stored procedures in MS-SQL from any VisualStudio framework is a royal pain in the ass. They tout DRY but I can't think why you have to jump through loops to get stored procedures to work in their frameworks; I have many complex queries in SQL to list records, why would I want to repeat the same SQL statements in an MVC app and in a WinForms app against the same database? The surest way to achieve DRY is to use stored procedures and let each app handle only the presentation of the data.
Having ranted against MS, I kind of like MVC 3 and the new Entity Framework, not quite up to speed on it, but so far I kind of like it and that has predisposed me towards looking at WP7 and see what has MS learned from past failures, which last year I would not have thought about at all.
Now, in a site supposedly rife with developers of all kinds, shouldn't we be more open about investigating and then adopting or rejecting new technology?
Please don't construct this as an advertisement for WP7, I'm simply saying, maybe one should look at it before dismissing it out of hand. I did some work in Symbian and (the pain!) Objective-C, so I don't think my eyes will pop-out if I look at WP7.
MS is going with the wrong strategy.. (Score:5, Insightful)
By forcing everyone to use
Re:Seems they have no idea what they are talking a (Score:4, Insightful)
Your game won't be *usable*, of course, since your game will be designed for a controller and not a touch screen.
I think that's the point. Who cares if you can port between two things that don't run the same kind of software? It's not like you're going to be playing Crysis on your phone. It's like having easy portability between Solaris and Android -- OK sure, but why?
Re:Seems they have no idea what they are talking a (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows = Keyboard + Mouse
XBox = Controller
WP7 = Touchscreen
I don't see much code being reused on quality apps, but it should lead to lots of mediocre games. Each game will work best on the platform targeted by the developer, and the quality of the ported versions will vary widely, but online tutorials are unlikely to have a positive effect.
C# is irrelevent ; only C++/GLES matters (Score:5, Insightful)
"Professional" mobile games (i.e. by commercial dev companies) are almost universally written in straight C/C++ with minimal ObjectiveC / Dalvik wrappers to get to the phone hardware.
If you have a hit title, do you -really- want to have to rewrite the whole thing from top to bottom to port it to other platforms?
I spent several months a few years back working hard to convince my employer (a certain US carrier) that going ahead and launching a J2ME-based mobile platform (in the last 00's - this is post-iPhone, people) was would elicit nothing more than mockery (and, at best, shovelware) from the developer community. My employer subsequently canned the idea, and I like to think that my steely knives helped kill the beast.
My main argument was that forcing developers to rewrite significant portions of code almost guarantees you won't get major titles, regardless of your hardware lineup.
One of the smartest things Google did with Android was the NDK; I recently ported a top-10 iPhone 3d game (written 99% in straight C/++) to Android NDK and including my getting-to-know-you time I was done in 3 weeks. Was scorchingly fast on the Galaxy Tab compared to iPad.
The frank reality is that iOS is very obviously the largest mobile platform for developers, and others (Android, WP7, WebOS etc) must make it as easy as possible to port titles over. ;-) but it appears they were smart enough to provide a plain-vanilla C++ and OGLES environment for games.
Google did a marvellous job of adding this capability; NDK gives you plenty enough bare metal to port easily from other platforms.
I've not looked at WebOS
Android and iPhone can handle running native code apps just fine. If WP7 can't make itself a viable (easy!) porting target like Android, it's going to be spending a lot of Saturday nights at home watching TV waiting for the phone to ring.
Re:I don't know about this whole "quality" thing (Score:4, Insightful)
That the game could be crappy story/gameplay wise is one thing, but Nintendo would not allow what we see in the PC gaming world nowadays: games full of bugs that make you feel like you are some kind of quality assurance technician working for those companies. And let me tell you another thing, I wholeheartedly believe that the programmers back in the day had to work their ass off pulling stuff in really underpowered hardware, with no niceties. Before, a company was able to program with optimized assembly code something like Mario Bros 3 and today, in the age of awesome debuggers, code profilers, source control, object-oriented programming and what not, we get this products that are rushed out of the door. I guess we have to thank the Internet for that. With the XBox360 I saw how that patch craze is coming with a vengeance to the console world. Part of that Nintendo Seal of Quality is that they would not allow something like EA to exist. You could only develop up to five titles per year.
Other than that, with Nintendo you get the guarantee that you get a nice, clean and fun games with the system, plus more or less affordable hardware. You could get an original NES system with 2 controllers, zapper and two games for $100, and today the Wii is still the cheaper of the big three by $100. If you ask me which system I would get for my kids I would chose Nintendo without blinking. The other systems expose too much unnecessary violence, sex and gore and their kid users kind of remind me of that tech kid in the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie. I have seen 10 year olds both in Canada and the US with stuff like Grand Theft Auto in their system, and since not all parents are created equal, then the kid that does have it is pretty much the cool kid in the block. That's like a big social issue to me.
Re:Weird story (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah... major astroturfing by Microsoft lately (including some newer Slashdot users to post happy messages), but the final sentence of the summary takes the cake:
Ultimately, this prevents the market being swamped, but above this, there seems to be a layer of games by big publishers (EA, etc) that just step past the smaller developers in the queue. This is the biggest drawback of the system.'
No... the biggest drawback of the system is that there are almost no customers to buy your app, so anything more than a quick port is uneconomical... and a quick port from iOS or Android (which is more important than XBox as a source of porting material) is impossible since W7 has no vanilla C/C++ and OpenGL ES.
Re:Seems they have no idea what they are talking a (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, because everybody knows that 90% of a game's code is in its UI and input system. Things like the game engine, AI, logic controlling elements in the game, resources, and netcode are completely irrelevant, right?
To be fair, WP7 doesn't support much in the way of netcode right now, and it's certainly not trivial to shift UI paradigms. However, that doesn't mean that the ability to use XNA, and resuse a lot of code as a result, isn't still quite valuable.
Re:Astroturfing (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically Microsoft do not have to pay for product placement on slashdot (and it seems unlikely that they would have done so and even more unlikely that this traditionally anti-Microsoft site would have acquiesced). Favourable articles about Windows 7 results in a large number of posts, and this translates into more ad views. Like it or not, Slashdot makes money by being controversial.
That said, the pro-Windows 7 comments (at least for the desktop version) are in keeping with the positive reception of the platform all over the net and is reflected in the increased sales of the OS compared to Vista. For this reason, claims of paid product placement and astroturfing seem highly unlikely. Obviously the recent douche who made incredibly obvious pro-Microsoft "astroturfings" under a variety of new accounts is the exception. But that was so blatant that it had to be a troll, rather than a real shill.
As for Windows Phone 7 (back on topic), often the people who have actually used it seem to report favourably on the platform. But like me, most people haven't even tried it and just assume that it will not be very good. I suspect that this is due one incredibly stupid mistake, and that was to not support copy and paste.
This was such a major (and publicly derided) problem on the first version of the iPhone that the lack of the feature in Microsoft's product just screams that the platform is unfinished. Whoever made that decision at Microsoft should be hung, drawn and quartered - and then sacked.
As with the original iPhone, it will be worth waiting for the next version of Windows Phone 7 before buying. Myself, I'm going to wait until Windows Phone 7 version 3.1 - that was the right strategy in the past!