Hi Rob,
I think you misunderstood my message also - I was offering an opinion on the
varying handsets I see entering the market and those currently in design. I
work with handsets from all countries and they all vary, some are fast, some
not so fast - you can't generalise that all the handsets from one country
are better than all the handsets from another. I'm also very aware of
product plans leading on for several years and the same is still true - cost
and intended audience change design and processing performance all the time.
Out of interest, it's amazing how much physical design can impact
performance of 3D. For example, a phone might focus on neat design and
battery life. This can impact performance to a large degree - a clam shell
phone will have to push the LCD bus through the hinge, which usually entails
a serial bus. This in turn lowers throughput to the LCD display, up to 4-5
times slower than a conventional design. So whilst a conventional handset
may not look as neat as a well-designed clam shell, it can actually push
more data round the system bus and achive higher display frame rates. Long
battery life usually means slow clock speeds for the processor, so whilst
one phone may not allow standby times of one month or more, it can be a
better gaming platform if the user doesn't care. Different types of RAM, bus
width and cache allocation have incredible impact on the ability to play
games, and these are dictated by cost, not technical advancement in the
society.
As I said, I'm not going to argue APIs, M3G *is* the standard for mobile 3D
Java in the West. Nokia, Siemens, Motorola and SonyEricsson have announced
support for it and plan to ship millions of phones. There are multiple
vendors, good tools support and many games on the horizon from Disney,
Activision, Sony and others. Where it is important for Japan is in exports -
if the games from Japan want to gain worldwide market adoption, then they
have to work within the M3G standard if they want the widest possible
marketplace. I'd love to see some of the great Japanese games in the West,
but they'll have to be M3G games if they want to get to the volume handsets.
So, are standard solutions like M3G better than proprietary ones? On the one
hand you could argue that a standard slows innovation, but then again if the
standard is a good one, do it slow innovation? Or does it establish a good
platform to allow innovation in content, not APIs? Is a DirectX game any
better than an OpenGL one, or is it just down to good game developers? Is
Quake better than Halo, are are they both just good games?
regards
Paul
Received on Sun Apr 25 00:27:41 2004