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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"

#291

Post by easrng »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #189
hnjst wrote: post #184

In the same vein I remember the first time I was able to use a phone to access "internet" from a computer. The "internet access" that the phone had to offer was called "WAP" and I was communicating with the phone via infrared (wireless \o/), you had to dial cabalistic symbols from the computer and to be really careful using their proxy to avoid sell-an-organ level out of plan charges. After that Android's deceptively…

> After that Android's deceptively straightforward tethering feature was almost saddening... Ha - you should've seen early iPhone tethering. Back in those days, net neutrality wasn't a legal right yet (at least here in the Netherlands), so the carriers would push a profile to your phone that disabled tethering. The solution, of course, was to jailbreak your phone and install a tweak that turned it back on.

Carriers still do that. I can only do tethering by running a SOCKS proxy in Termux and forwarding the port with adb.

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

#292

Post by meibo »

Deathmax wrote: post #234
jbjbjbjb wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give examples? I can’t picture the use cases, I don’t game often.

yuzu, a Switch emulator, had introduced network play support a while ago that was gated behind Patreon subscriptions but was subsequently removed. https://yuzu-emu.org/entry/yuzu-x-raptor/ IIRC, for a while cemu (a Wii U emulator) had builds with support for Breath of the Wild gated behind Patreon early access as well.

Yes, the raptor thing seemed a bit fishy to me back then as well, especially since they're a non-free third party.

Happy that they got rid of it, but there was quite a bit of community pushback needed.

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

#293

Post by BlueTemplar »

dangrossman wrote: post #276
asdff wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point 2 and 3 are baffling to me. Garmins mounted on the windshield have been a thing in vehicles since the early 2000s at least.

In the early 2000s, I had to take my Garmin off the windshield and hide it in the trunk every time I parked, otherwise someone would break in and steal it. My car was broken into 3 times. Someone also stole my Microsoft Zune when I forgot to take that in with me.

Heck, this happened to me in the late 2010s...

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

#294

Post by definitelyhuman »

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…

Oh wow, yeah my first mobile game studio had a huge industrial fastener shelf with little drawers stuffed with different phones. We started in 2004, and feature phone game dev was indeed wild. We did a lot of WWE games in 2d and 3d, needing ~15 different reference builds ranging from 64k 2d builds to 800k 3d for high end, plus another set for all the BREW devices. Managing code, asset pipelines, and qa across high/med/low 2d/3d Java/cpp permutations was a huge challenge, but it was so satisfying to be good at. I love what mobile has turned into, and never want to debug another random c crash on device ever again, but I do miss the cabinet of phones and all the crazy variation

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

#295

Post by nwallin »

INTPenis wrote: post #204
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What feature phones can get on modern networks? I thought LTE "needed" a smartphone for some reason

No way. There are plenty of dumb phones. I never heard the term feature phone before but when I google it I see it described as dumb phones. I have a great Alcatel dumb phone with dual sims and NO OTHER FEATURES. :D That's exactly what you want from a dumb phone. It works just fine on any mobile network today in Sweden. It cost the equivalent of 24 USD.

Feature phones are distinct from dumb phones. Feature phone usually implies there is a suite of built in programs. It will have a note keeping application, an image viewer/gallery view, sometimes (rarely) email, a mp3 player, a handful of games which for some inexplicable reason always includes Snake, etc.

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

#296

Post by markmark »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #208
throwaway894345 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially with respect to Bluetooth quirks. Every single phone has a different set of bugs in its bluetooth components, and none of those sets are remotely empty. In the end, we decided we could only afford to support the 5 most popular models of the day and if you don't have that phone, then too bad for you.

Don't get me started on programming with BLE on Android. *shudders*

I literally yesterday had to buy my first iphone since the 3G because my wife bought some BLE hardware for her work that won't work properly with her Pixel 3. (It's a set of 12 devices and the Pixel can only connect to six at a time). The manufacturer won't even list Android devices they claim to have tested it with.

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

#297

Post by ineedasername »

kllrnohj wrote: post #171
ineedasername wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the fame associated with these names was only possible because they canes from a small indie group that broke through to the mainstream so massively successful that I can't think of any other example on that scale in the last decade. In the 90's and early 00's, many big names practically were studio, the brand.

There are definitely still "well known names" in the indie scene. They may not hit mainstream success, but there's for example there's some pretty well known members of the Factorio team in the Factorio community (kovarex & Klonan come to mind). There's people like Maddy Thorson of Towerfall & Celeste fame. If they decide to embrace it I imagine one of the very few people on the team behind Valheim would also fit thi…

Sure, but they're not breakthrough names like Carmack & a few others, and are unlikely to be known by anyone not familiar with those particular games.

Carmack on the other hand is completely unavoidable if you even casually tune in to gaming news. I've never player a Doom game, but I know who Carmack is. In contrast, I've played 200+ hours of Factorio, and had no idea what the names of the developers were.

I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it takes much more than a breakout hit from indie devs to thrust them to Carmack levels of fame.

Part of it is likely due to technology changes. A big part of Carmack's fame initially stemmed not only from having a wildly popular game, but having done things with hardware that were practically magical at the time. The use of Binary Space Partitioning-- a not very well known technique for rendering that had, to my knowledge, never been used in videogames before was used by Carmack because he could not only program, he rises above the level of programmer to computer scientist. Many people study computer science in college or bootcamps, but most simply become programmers.

Compare that to today's game dev ecosystem: Even indies are typically using a variety of middleware and off-the shelf software to build there game. There is both less room and less need for the type of hackery of the Carmack era (which wasn't unique just to Carmack). These days if you want your game to do something more computationally intensive, you just do it, and up the minimum reqs from a gtx 950 to a gtx 960.

I think this is why the closes thing to the level of celebrity of a single dev we've had in a while is Notch w/ Minecraft. He didn't get there by pushing the boundaries of hardware to make something previously not possible, he simply put in long years of iterative design that results in a unique breakthrough hit that appealed to hugely different audiences. If we're looking for future celebrity devs, that's the sort I would expect, and they seem much more rare.

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

#298

Post by MobileVet »

My cofounder and I started RiffWare in 2004 with our eyes set on BREW. Carrier billing was the reason... and if you made it onto the carrier store, you did well. So many great stories.

We didn’t have experience in games, so our thesis was to make the dumb phones ‘start.’ We actually have quite a few ‘firsts’ (to our knowledge) and ended up with several of our own apps in the Best Sellers list on Verizon.

We were responsible for the first BREw certified app to use the camera (for bar code reading) via a consulting gig.

We launched a Guitar Tuner that was actually quite high quality despite the cheap hardware. It quickly became a best seller and shocked the Verizon rep when people would buy it for $25.

We also launched a Do Not Disturb app that was fantastic. We tried to port that to the iPhone in 2010 but Apple wouldn’t allow it.

I am convinced we were also the very first people to honestly lose and recover a phone using tower based location services while testing a new app we called Secure Phone. Verizon wouldn’t launch that app though because they were concerned about privacy. 2 years later that was a moot point.

Another fun fact about that, Sam Altman launched Loopt during that time. I asked him how the heck he got Verizon to approve it... ‘board member’ was his answer. Smart money for the win.

Not a bad run for a small group of indie developers with no backing. Great memories.

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

#299

Post by MobileVet »

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…

I remember Javaground!!

We actually worked with the BREW platform, so we only had 50 phones instead of the 300 java ones. Lol, too funny

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

#300

Post by MobileVet »

SNosTrAnDbLe wrote: post #145

I used Qualcomm brew in grad school to create an accelerometer based app to detect falls for senior people. I remember the first time it detected a simulated fall !! I was new to such sophisticated phones and it felt like an amazing achievement. I remember talking to a Qualcomm engineer who helped me with the internal API and the whole setup. Fun times!!

The Qualcomm engineers were always very approachable. It was a small but cool community.

Congrats on doing something intrinsically valuable. Using the accelerometer like that so early was slick!

I got an email once from a woman that thanked me profusely for our Do Not Disturb app that kept an abusive boyfriend from harassing her. That felt good.

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