By Usually when we hear about Android Market and the iPhone App Store we hear about comparisons in terms of # of applications. But what about games? Surely games fit under the app umbrella to which they refer, but it’s also clear that games have a HUGE and yet unmet potential on mobile devices. It looks like Epic Games is taking a step forward in that area.
Check out the following paragraph from an article on Anandtech:
I got together with Mark Rein last week and he showed me an Unreal Engine 3 tech demo running on a 3rd generation iPod Touch. The same Unreal Engine 3 that powers Gears of War 2, running on an iPod Touch. The engine also works on the iPhone 3GS, and Mark tells me that we’ll see it on another mobile platform at CES (hmm…).
Android anyone? Take a peek at the iPhone/iPod version:
I’m really hoping Android is that “next” platform and I’m betting it will be. Mobile gaming isn’t yet on the brink of erupting, but in the next few years it is one of the largest frontiers of opportunity and I’m wishing Epic Games huge success. Afterall, success for them means others will follow.
Can’t wait. With the hardware keyboard and dpad, my droid makes an excellent gaming device. I run snesoid frequently, but getting some modern 3d shooters will be wonderful.
That would be just perfect, since developers could use one tool to make a game for both platforms.
If they’d have this for Symbian, WinMo, etc aswell, they could have a consistent game quality for all platforms simultaneously.
Which means there is no need for porting or two seperate developing projects.
And that could lead to a breakthrough in mobile gaming!
how come blizzard havent made WoW mobile yet? tho i dont play that game coz of it being a piece of crap, many ppl/nerds do. I dunno if current devices are capable of running it @ sufficient fps for gameplay but imagine how many nerds would be willing to pay money for at least sitting in a virtual pub drinking virtual beer and hitting on a virtual dwarven girl with giant virtual boobs
@pt
The Internet!
Where men are men,
Women are men,
Big breasted, dwarven girls are men,
And children are FBI agents.
Have you tried the polar bit games? theyre not as polished as this one but iits pretty close..and the game Toonwarz has multi touch controlls for the droid
@pt: “tho i dont play that game coz of it being a piece of crap”
I don’t play it either, but it’s because I don’t like it, not “coz” it’s a piece of crap.
Once you’ve created a game that millions of people love to play, and makes hundreds of millions / billions (?) of dollars, come back and we’ll talk.
that would be AMAZING. Next step, someone need to contact John Carmack and get him working on a game for the Android, he made games before for the j2me, so why not the android !!!
@pt
WoW is most definitely not a piece of crap. A piece of crap would not have 11+ million players. Actually, it sounds to me like you played it, sucked at it, and now refer to it as “crap”. You must also be very young (or at least very immature) since you love calling people that play that game “nerds”. Most of the people that play WoW are surprisingly not nerds at all and there are many that play sports, have lives outside the game, etc.. Anyway, WoW will never come to mobile devices for 3 main reasons:
First, and if you had a brain at all then you would already know this but WoW’s controls could not be simplified to a screen that small.
Second, WoW already has crappy frames on PCs, do you really think they could pull that off on mobile devices?
Third, 3G networks have a latency of 250-300ms, try playing WoW with that.
Anyway, back on the original topic… hopefully we will start seeing a lot more 3D games for Android.
“hopefully we will start seeing a lot more 3D games for Android.” Only when manufacturers get over that stupid limit on internal memory or allow apps to run from the SD card. 500mb? Are you kidding? You could fit 1 or 2 games and then the phone’s memory is toast. That’s why Android games suck now- developers have to make them smaller than 5mb or users complain “It’s too big!!!”
I would love for the other mobile platform they mention to be Android, but I’d be willing to bet that there are no Android phones that have been released (other than perhaps the Acer A1) that are powerful enough to run that demo that smoothly. The Droid’s specs rival the iPhone 3GS, but the Droid also pushes twice as many pixels which would further strain the processor. I have no doubt that the UE3 engine will eventually come to Android when snapdragons are commonplace, but my money is on the Zune HD for the CES announcement given its powerful Tegra SOC and Epic’s history with Microsoft. I hope I’m wrong though.
as cool as that would be, I don’t think the current android phones are ready for it,
well, maybe android 2.0 is strong enough, but definitely not any of the older android phones
@Daniel regarding WoW. If they did port WoW to mobile, they would have a toned down version both graphically and control wise. I do agree that it is unlikely, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Also, almost every MMO is designed to work over a dial up connection. That implies 250-400ms ping. It might get a bit laggy at times, but developers design MMOs to account for slower connections.
@Ratnok regarding memory limitations. 90%+ of space needed comes from assets (graphics and sounds). Any game can install this data on the SD card and use it from there. Buy the Doom or Quake games for Android if you don’t believe me. This means a 500Mb game might only need to install 1-10mb of data on the internal memory (basically the apk). The rest goes to the SD card. It is a myth that you can’t run a game off of an SD card. Further, if lots of games use the unreal engine, it would only have to be installed once and every game can just use the same copy of the engine.
@Ratnok
I agree that putting larger storage in phones (would 1GB kill them? really?) and allowing apps to store files on the SD card would be a great boon to development. Letting apps fully install to SD cards is a piracy issue, but just letting the apps store large files on the card shouldn’t be too bad.
All that aside, the limits aren’t really that bad. In between lo-res textures (and even the droid’s WVGA 848×480 is really lo-res when compared to a computer’s 1360×768 or 1280×1024 display) and lower quality audio files (which no-one will notice with a phone’s cheap speaker’s) the programs can be amazingly small. Polarbit’s 3D games are all just a few megabytes.
@Bobby Kiaie
Are you sure ToonWarz is multitouch? Last time I played the demo it sure didn’t seem multitouch, and people were complaining in the comments that it needed multitouch. Yes, I have a moto Droid.
@barry99705 someones been reading douglas adams :) lol.
@Ratnok
Apps can already store large files on the SD Card, just the main installation has to be on the phone’s memory for (as l3reak said) privacy issues. There are a few apps that do this now, I just can’t remember names atm.
@l3reak
Ya im sure they just updated it today version 1.05 i think is multitouch for the droid..im not sure about the free version though
and about the games not running well…they will run well especially on the droid..quake runs full speed on my htc hero..which has lower processor and lower ram…and the quake is on par with the graphics of this game
m-azing how tech is changing so fast with cellphones…what I can’t wait to see is when android has a lot of phones on the market that kills the iphone…but then I hear apples making other phones for other cellphone companies. ..interesting
I m wondering how they would do this technically… isn’t android java based? They would have to natively compile their engine in order for it to run fast enough. And since android can run on many different CPU platforms, they could not just release a single “binary” or “app” for every device.
im starting to doubt that its going to be ported to the Android platform, i think we’re going to see on Zune HD since it has a powerful processor and very much similar to the iphone/ipod-touch, they would be developing for one device instead of multiple devices like we have on the Android
umm what does this article have to do with Android?
android does run mostly java, but also supports native C compiled code too. There was a dev news release a few months back about this feature.