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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"

#321

Post by wolverine876 »

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…

> These days it's the studios themselves that get most of the credit.

It certainly serves the studios' interests to reduce their talents' market power. If customers recognized individual devs and wanted games made by them, those devs could demand more money and more influence.

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

#322

Post by wolverine876 »

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.

> Back in those days, net neutrality wasn't a legal right yet (at least here in the Netherlands) ...

You must live in the future!

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

#323

Post by tylerc230 »

flir wrote: post #236
ingenieroariel wrote: post #212

I worked on a J2ME app that needed to access location on phones without GPS, I was in touch with the operator and got a list of cell ids with lat, lon. With that I created a daemon in Symbian that would query the cell id and open up a socket server to give it to the J2ME app. With that we developed an app to request a taxi service, but none of the taxi companies wanted it. Some of the complaints were: 1. GPRS data pl…

"Good idea but before it's time" crashed so many mobile startups pre-iPhone.

I worked for a company that allowed you to play along with jeopardy on your brew/Jme device in real time as you watch the show live on tv. You could compete with your friends in real time, leaderboards, chat etc. The company eventually went under but I can’t help but think if it had been ported to iOS when it came out it would have been a hit. I’ve still never seen any technology like it.

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

#324

Post by astrange »

nwallin wrote: post #288
underyx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case you want a simple explanation for this story: he tried to run an old pre-iPhone mobile game on a computer. The game runs very slow on computers, which is surprising considering the performance difference between these old phones and a modern computer. The reason turned out to be that the game runs a memory cleaning command to avoid bugs arising from lack of space. Since modern computers have 10000x more memor…

> Since modern computers have 10000x more memory to clean up, The thing I don't understand is that the application presumably isn't using any more or less memory than it did when it ran on a 1/10,000x computer. You're not scanning the whole RAM for memory to clean up, just the allocated memory. And on a game that was designed to use 128kB, that's presumably not very much.

If the game was built with premature scalability and you're letting it see how much RAM there actually is, instead of giving it 128KB, I can see it hitting some bugs and getting really aggressive.

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

#325

Post by astrange »

Rolpa wrote: post #30
Retr0spectrum wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Something tells me Mr. Carmack himself wouldn't approve of such engineering practices, no?

It's not always necessary to do a strict pre-commit code review system. If you're working on commercial projects you might be used to pair programming or post-commit review (which IIRC isn't actually that risky.)

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

#326

Post by astrange »

pjmlp wrote: post #216
kalleboo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These phones had like 1 MB, 2 MB, 4 MB of RAM. And these were 3D-accelerated games running on them. A GC language was definitely the wrong choice for the platform, but J2ME was the industry standard because portable. So if you're allocating a dozen objects in a frame it's best to GC them in the same frame or you're going to lose tens of frames later. Even in modern times, for the longest time Android Java apps had la…

Refcounting has glitches as well.

The refcounting isn't so bad but freeing and running destructors can pause. There's also memory fragmentation from not having a compacting GC. It's all fixable though.

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

#327

Post by catblast01 »

surfsvammel wrote: post #239
mwcampbell wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. Looking at a screen on the windshield while driving was never going to be approved by authorities. The solution to that seems so obvious: make the phone speak to the driver instead. Was turn-by-turn navigation not feasible back then? Or what else am I missing?

This is me guessing: This sounds like before turn-by-turn navigation was possible. If they had to approximate location via a set list of cell ids, then that doesn't give very precise location data. Also, back then, I am guessing, there where not as good map data available, especially not that would fit in a phone. I would also think that this was before synthesised speech was really possible to do on a phone. The wor…

Is everyone here too old to remember MapQuest or CD based car navigation systems? Apparently. We had decent turn by turn in the 90s. In the US mapping data was heavily derived mostly from public Census TIGER data, which had flaws but was good enough.

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

#329

Post by [deleted] »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #232
mgkimsal wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I honestly miss these times - it sparked so much creativity when one needed to achieve something in such a limited environment. As someone from the c64/apple][/atari generation... it was constantly amazing to see how much people could push a single device. Lots of creativity, as you say. But... we seemed to hit a wall with the whole j2me-era of "just get creative to work around things!" mindset. Because, IIRC, ther…

> fwiw, this made me spend a few minutes in youtube looking at old c64 and apple and Atari demos. what people ended up doing with those devices - years after they were mainstream - is still crazy to me. The craziest ever, to me, is the following in 256... bytes. Bytes (including the music ofc, which is the whole point). https://youtu.be/sWblpsLZ-O8

[deleted]

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

#330

Post by cachvico »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #232
mgkimsal wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I honestly miss these times - it sparked so much creativity when one needed to achieve something in such a limited environment. As someone from the c64/apple][/atari generation... it was constantly amazing to see how much people could push a single device. Lots of creativity, as you say. But... we seemed to hit a wall with the whole j2me-era of "just get creative to work around things!" mindset. Because, IIRC, ther…

> fwiw, this made me spend a few minutes in youtube looking at old c64 and apple and Atari demos. what people ended up doing with those devices - years after they were mainstream - is still crazy to me. The craziest ever, to me, is the following in 256... bytes. Bytes (including the music ofc, which is the whole point). https://youtu.be/sWblpsLZ-O8

That's incredible!
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