series 60 questions (frustrations)

[ameano]

Hi all

Okay I am very frustrated >:( and was going to enter the subject line as “help…” but decided those kinda subject lines annoy me, so anyway… why i am i so frustrated…

i want to develop games for series 60 devices… lets ignore marketeing and selling games for now, heres a list of some the things im having difficulty understanding:

• are all series 60 devices supposed to have the same 176 x 208 screen resolution? if so how come the siemens sx1 boasts a 176 x 220?
• i know there is an sdk for series 60. does this mean that i can just use this and base all my apps on midp 1.0? does it support things like image transparency? If so wouldnt this make nokia ui api, etc pointless? or am i asking the wrong question.
• seriously, what is the point of midp 2 if i need to make my applications compatible with midp 1 and can just use nokia ui api or SMTK?? I have realised that ill have to probably end up writing my own sprite / layer mechanisms (i mean who needs a 4 byte integer for a tile value on a mobile device?!?! :o). Is this what everyone else does?

As you can probably tell I am very confused… yes there are a lot of resources on the web, but seriously who designed forum nokia, i mean from a usability point of view and finding information its totally crap. Theres so many documents that just overwhelm the beginner/average developer.

I really need to start learning properly, writing games that are compatible with series 60 phones, so hopefully I can do a good uni project next year. I choose to limit my platform, makes it easier - but the amount of useless information is just giving me a headache.

I want to be more focused on writing an interesting game but all these platforms, sdks tools and whatnot are making my head spin (anyone else had the same feeling?) and seem to be limiting my creativity.

Please help with thoughts / suggestions / answers to the questions.

Regards
Ameano

[shmoove]

• are all series 60 devices supposed to have the same 176 x 208 screen resolution? if so how come the siemens sx1 boasts a 176 x 220?

Nokia Series 60 phones are 176x208. Other manufacturers have made Series 60 phones, and Series 600 “compatible” phones that don’t follow the specs to the line. I don’t know about the SX1, but for example on the K700 if you use MIDP 2.0’s GameCanvas you get 176x220 pixels, and if you use Nokia’s FullCanvas you get 176x208 pixels.

• i know there is an sdk for series 60. does this mean that i can just use this and base all my apps on midp 1.0? does it support things like image transparency? If so wouldnt this make nokia ui api, etc pointless? or am i asking the wrong question.

Yes you can base your apps on MIDP 1.0. But it’s functionality is limited so that’s why there are proprietary APIs.
Transparency support? Depends on what you mean. You can load an image with transparency and it will display fine, but if you try to create a mutable image it will have an opaque background. The Nokia API has a method to create transparent mutable images but it is broken on Series 60. In fact, the Java implementation on Series 60 phones is quite crappy. There are tons of bugs and behaviour that doesn’t conform to the spec, and many people are unpleasantly surprised to find out that all that wonderful functionality the phones have is usually unaccessible to Java.

• seriously, what is the point of midp 2 if i need to make my applications compatible with midp 1 and can just use nokia ui api or SMTK?? I have realised that ill have to probably end up writing my own sprite / layer mechanisms (i mean who needs a 4 byte integer for a tile value on a mobile device?!?! :o). Is this what everyone else does?

The point is that in a few years MIDP 1.0 with all those horrible proprietary APIs will be a thing of the past. Hopefully by then you will be able to assume almost every phone will be at least MIDP 2.0/MMAPI 1.0 compatible (by then you will be asking “what’s the point of MIDP 3?” ;D ). For now, in a commercial release there is usually no other option but to support all the different flavours out there (this means a lot more than just Series 60).

As you can probably tell I am very confused… yes there are a lot of resources on the web, but seriously who designed forum nokia, i mean from a usability point of view and finding information its totally crap. Theres so many documents that just overwhelm the beginner/average developer.
I really need to start learning properly, writing games that are compatible with series 60 phones, so hopefully I can do a good uni project next year. I choose to limit my platform, makes it easier - but the amount of useless information is just giving me a headache.

Those are rich man’s troubles. You have too much documentation. Defenitely better than not enough. You don’t have to read every single article. You can safely ignore the success stories and most of the usabillity articles (those will become more relevant later) and just look into a few of the technical articles. Download the SDK read a couple of the “Getting started making games” articles and get cracking.

shmoove

[ameano]

Ok thanks a lot shhmoove… your advice is definitely motivating.

So far I have the following installed:

• JSDK 1.5.1
• NetBeans 4.0 + Mobility Pack
• J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.2
• A lot of documentation

What else do I need to install for series 60 phones?

Thanks

[moonknightskye]

Hi

if you really wanted to program series 60 of NOKIA type I suggest to download it from the NOKIA DEVELOPER site… just register and you can download Nokia’s SDK’s for their series 60,40 & 30 phones… I found Sun Studio Mobility as a useful IDE for it… as of now Im using the ff to develop nokia J2me

jdk1.4.2
Sun Studio Mobility Q4 (sun)
J2ME wireless toolkit 2.2 (sun)
Nokia Series 60 SDK (u can have this in Nokia Developer site)

if you have some kinda trouble (like what i experienced the first time i used it… you should download the msxml parser (from microsoft))

Im so sorry if i cant help you on other s60 SDK’s for siemens etc… all i know is nokia

[moonknightskye]

errr… i guess that didn’t helped… ive written a code that is identical to the MIDP2’s Sprite, LayerManager, and TiledBackground… and the target is MIDP1… in short i ported those 3 MIDP2 classes to MIDP1… if you wanted to have a copy of it i can give it to anyone because I love everyone in this Forum ;D

to give you some fact… competeting mobile phones like nokia, siemens, panasonic, snyerricson produces phones which is not actually the same as their competing brands… like the API’s, ScreenColor, resolution and they intend it so that developers focus on their product… i know that java is platform independent but as of now they are creating their own API which maximises their phone’s performance and they target that developers should focus only on their product…

Me, I focus primarilly on Nokia phones of any type and as of now i dont have the confusion you have… so i suggest you to just focus on a single or two platform… just dont compare 2 phones of the same category of different type because they are still DIFFERENT!!!

I hope this may somehow help you… NYAHAHAHA ;D