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Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

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Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#41

Post by pjmlp »

meheleventyone wrote: post #27
EarthLaunch wrote: post #13

I worked at a startup, Javaground [1], where we ported and developed games for J2ME phones. We had a room full of dressers full of all the different mobile phones of the day. Each phone had different implementation quirks, such as variable audio delay when playing a file, audio/image formats that were faster/slower, odd button events (some used press, some used ondown, some had no ondown, etc). A lot of our work was…

My very first industry job was making J2ME games and oh my god does it still give me nightmares.

If you miss it, just try Android, contrary to Google arguments against J2ME, the fragmentation experience is kept unchanged.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#42

Post by stonemetal12 »

ziggus wrote: post #21

So, the bytecode instrumentation as post-compilation functional modification tool is pretty interesting. More info here: https://blogs.sap.com/2016/03/09/java-bytecode-instrumentati... . I wonder if there's any 'defense' against this kind of thing.

For as long as I can remember there has been the capability to sign jars. So you can detect tampering, though not prevent it.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#43

Post by pjmlp »

DistressedDrone wrote: post #16
intsunny wrote: post #9

John Carmack writes: > Unlike most emulator projects, Kemulator turned out to be closed source abandonware It is amazing that in the past two decades most emulators transitioned from closed source closely guarded secrets to open sourced and often under a popular license. The preservation is unparalleled.

It surprises me the number of people who thought they could make money selling emulators, in what is and has always been almost exclusively dedicated to piracy.

Not at all, emulators are also a way to keep old games alive.

Like still being able to watch that old VHS movie on BluRay HD, or listening to Swing records from 1920 in 2021.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#44

Post by the_lonely_road »

ineedasername wrote: post #32

I'm not sure that in the present day of massive teams and > $100 million budgets that there's much room for new celebrity game developers to emerge on that scale. Pretty much every gamer knows who he is. Now, even the biggest breakthrough indie game with a 5 person dev team wouldn't become a household name. These days it's the studios themselves that get most of the credit. Which may only be fair: When there's 100+ p…

I think you are right. The closest I can come to a modern example would be Darkest Dungeon (made by 2 people) and Slay the Spire/Stardew Valley (both made by single devs) however owing to your point I don’t remember their names despite reading about them at least a few times. I would recognize John Carmacks face in a crowded room not to mention obviously unlikely to ever forget his name.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#45

Post by mbb70 »

Had the same fix to a wildly different situation. A long running Spark job that accepts 100s of jars and runs 1000s of stages over its lifetime was having intermittent massive GC pauses. Too intermittent as it happens, practically periodic. Turns out Spark runs System.GC() every 30 minutes by default. DisableExplicitGC fixed everything right up.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#46

Post by VRay »

adamrezich wrote: post #34
ineedasername wrote: post #32

I'm not sure that in the present day of massive teams and > $100 million budgets that there's much room for new celebrity game developers to emerge on that scale. Pretty much every gamer knows who he is. Now, even the biggest breakthrough indie game with a 5 person dev team wouldn't become a household name. These days it's the studios themselves that get most of the credit. Which may only be fair: When there's 100+ p…

well yeah there's less crucial core stuff to pioneer these days

nobody's figured out a UX for VR yet so far as I know

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#47

Post by rblatz »

ineedasername wrote: post #32

I'm not sure that in the present day of massive teams and > $100 million budgets that there's much room for new celebrity game developers to emerge on that scale. Pretty much every gamer knows who he is. Now, even the biggest breakthrough indie game with a 5 person dev team wouldn't become a household name. These days it's the studios themselves that get most of the credit. Which may only be fair: When there's 100+ p…

It’s not as recent as it seems in my mind, but Notch is a relatively well known game dev. And in the younger crowd he may be even well known than Carmack.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#48

Post by eru »

pizzabearman wrote: post #26

GC feels like this magic box. Does great things for you without having to worry about memory leaks, which is great. But like anything that is magical you give up some control. I guess it's a tradeoff

Well, malloc and free are black boxes as well. And in typical implementations can potentially take arbitrary amounts of time to run, too. (Though they usually don't.)

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#49

Post by stefan_ »

delecti wrote: post #29
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #4

The chain all in one place, such that it's readable: > Before the iPhone existed, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones": Doom RPG 1&2, Orcs&Elves 1&2, and Wolfenstein RPG. Qualcomm's native-code BREW platform had better versions, but I haven't seen any emulators and archives for it, so they may be lost at this point. The J2ME (java mobile) versions are still floating around, and can be emulate…

I'm curious how the UI looks to other people, because "all in once place" isn't really a complaint I can understand about the Twitter UI I'm seeing. There's buttons and stuff between tweets, but with 280 characters per tweet (140 was definitely less readable) they're not significantly more difficult to read on Twitter than they are in the paragraphs you posted.

The Twitter web UI if you are not logged in is purposefully broken. Every so often, it will just show you "access denied" or "you don't have permission". It is the peak of dark patterns.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#50

Post by omega3 »

ineedasername wrote: post #32

I'm not sure that in the present day of massive teams and > $100 million budgets that there's much room for new celebrity game developers to emerge on that scale. Pretty much every gamer knows who he is. Now, even the biggest breakthrough indie game with a 5 person dev team wouldn't become a household name. These days it's the studios themselves that get most of the credit. Which may only be fair: When there's 100+ p…

It happened recently with Markus Persson and Jonathan Blow.
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