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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"

#191

Post by fmax30 »

Retr0spectrum wrote: post #19
fmax30 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would absolutely blow my mind, I would even merge it without multiple approves. :D And add a new contributors section in the readme with John Carmack at the top.

John Carmack is awesome, but I find this level of deification (of any individual) kinda creepy - it just feels unhealthy. Would you like to be treated that way, in Carmack's position? I realize that your comment was likely made in jest, but it still bugs me.

Of course, I made the comment in jest. But it certainly would be an honor for anyone nonetheless.

(if it did happen for real the most I would do is print out the commit hash with his name next to it :D, because he is one of the people I look up to in CS, others being Knuth and Tarjan among others, I would do the same for them, but then again I don't think they are active open source contributors)

Nonetheless, Carmack is still one of the most impactful programmer of the modern era.

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

#192

Post by pjmlp »

m45t3r wrote: post #187
pjmlp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another one that wasn't blessed with OEM deviations from AOSP.

We have "been blessed" with OEM deviations from AOSP (we have a big number of clients and most of them are using Android because of regional characteristics), but still we have way more issues with customers using out-dated iOS versions than users on those devices. For comparison, we have way more iOS issues than Android ones, even if Android is the vast majority of our user base (~70% of our customers). Anyway, even…

- Bluetooth issues

- Camera is hit and miss, even after the renewed API

- Apps randomly killed on the background

- Intents that don't launch as expected

- NDK debugging that cannot attach to the server running on the device

- Unstable GPGPU drivers

- Keyboard handling

- Perfectly working code that needs to be rewritten just because

Yeah so much better than J2ME.

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

#195

Post by UnpossibleJim »

ALittleLight wrote: post #128
ComodoHacker wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really Twitter or the habit to write everything there, even lengthy posts?

It's interesting to think about why that habit exists. It seems like a low barrier to entry to me. If Carmack had wanted to post to Medium or something he would've had to write and edit the whole essay and get people to come read it. On Twitter Carmack posts a paragraph as it comes to him. Could do the whole thing at once. Could take days to complete the thread or longer. It could be as long as he wants. One tweet or…

Reading Carmack's thought to text style writing (a la Joyce's Ulysses) might be the only thing the get me to wade into the sess pool that is Twitter .... Holy crap, that was the most arrogant, self agrandizing post I've ever made =( I wish I didn't feel that way, but I do =)

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

#196

Post by acdha »

I remember BREW but barely used more than the demos: we were in San Diego and Qualcomm was trying to get local developers interested. We had a few clients considering it but the terms we were getting were eye-watering: if memory serves, it was $50k or more per carrier just to be listed for sale, plus a big chunk of the purchase price, and that was just a floor — the carriers wanted to adjust up based on your perceived ability to pay. We had some household name clients but just having money didn’t mean they would entertain the idea of adding so much fixed cost to the project just to see if it’d eventually become popular enough to break even.

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

#197

Post by cm2012 »

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…

ConcernedApe with StarDew valley has more revenue than any sega genesis game had back in the day.

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

#198

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

tauntz wrote: post #163
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…

Ah, it's nostalgia-a-clock. I worked on Skype for J2ME with a 3-4 person dev team. Custom UI kit, 128x128 screens, 128kb available memory and other fun limitations.. I think we re-wrote our text rendering/styling/wrapping code more times than there were actual releases of the app :) I honestly miss these times - it sparked so much creativity when one needed to achieve something in such a limited environment.

Also that version of Skype was way better than this hot steaming pile of manure currently shipped by Microsoft.

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

#200

Post by awaaz »

Oh man, do I have fond memories of developing on feature phones!

Started wayyy back in 2007, and was a cofounder of a startup that made popular J2ME games available for free to people by wrapping it in our proprietary ad serving software. We launched more or less the same time that AbMob did, invented more or less the same stack (ad delivery to mobile phones), but we focussed on the product (games) whereas they focussed on the platform (ad delivery). A few years later AdMob was acquired for mega $$$ by Google, whereas we just kind of limped along and died a slow, natural death! Many years later I discovered that my cofounder just let our 4 letter domain expire (www.hovr.com) and I think it's up for sale now :(

Also remember developing games on the BREW platform by Qualcomm, circa 2005. Whereas I was in India which mostly had GSM J2ME phones, BREW was much more popular on North American CDMA handsets. I, along with a friend, developed one of the first real-time multiplayer games called Blingster Battle, which was on top of Verizon's charts for a brief period of time! Truly groundbreaking stuff at that time..

The most amazing bit, though, was when we made some BREW apps around 2013. By then iOS and Android had firmly taken over the smartphone market, and all the cool kids were downloading apps/games on them. However there was a very significant portion of the market - primarily composed of the elderly - who were still hanging on to their old CDMA feature phones and were still interested in buying new apps. We made a couple of quiz types games, that actually generated a couple of thousand dollars in revenue every month till last year, until Qualcomm finally pulled the plug on BREW!

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