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Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"
371–380 of 407 posts
Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cross-thread refcounting is not that common and the CPU has very fast atomics anyway. It's still a better tradeoff than having to sweep (which might need to page in), make all pointers visible, accept the occasional peak memory increase, etc.
What are the options for sharing an object between threads then? And even with having good atomics, it is a very significant overhead. Also, the primary reason for modern GCs having significantly better performance than refcounting is that with GC one can move the majority of work to another thread, letting them continue the work. Refcounting is good for some simple programs where ownership is not trivial, and the la…
> What are the options for sharing an object between threads then?
It works fine, it’s just not done that often. (Specifically contended refcount changing isn’t done, which is why having fast uncontended atomic helps.) Transferring between threads happens and just works.
ObjC has explicit weak pointers and ways to move destructors to another thread and it all works. Though you could use C# or JavaScript in your app, many people do.
Actually, PHP and Python do use refcounting internally, I think PHP only GCs on exits from functions…
Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oic I almost suspect that was the case. The wikipedia article did not list dumb phones, but in fact phones that had a lot cooler games than Snake.
Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the options for sharing an object between threads then? And even with having good atomics, it is a very significant overhead. Also, the primary reason for modern GCs having significantly better performance than refcounting is that with GC one can move the majority of work to another thread, letting them continue the work. Refcounting is good for some simple programs where ownership is not trivial, and the la…
> What are the options for sharing an object between threads then? It works fine, it’s just not done that often. (Specifically contended refcount changing isn’t done, which is why having fast uncontended atomic helps.) Transferring between threads happens and just works. ObjC has explicit weak pointers and ways to move destructors to another thread and it all works. Though you could use C# or JavaScript in your app,…
I don’t get your point. Of course refcounting is a possible and working solution, but it’s not an accident that Java, JS, and C#, languages with the best GCs, doesn’t use it.
Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"
#375Earlier 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.
Sure, but it's glitches you control. Everything is deterministic. With a GC, your only solution is to call the GC explicitly on every frame and pray for the best.
Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"
#376I really liked this game "stolen in 60 seconds"
in my 8th grade I played this for hous on my nokia phone
https://www.getjar.com/categories/all-games/puzzle-and-strat...
They never released android or ios version and probably the company is closed now. one of the best mobile hames I have ever played!
Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"
#377I had a blast spinning up J2ME Loader on my phone (it's on f-droid) and playing games I had on my Sony Ericsson W595 back in the day :) Worms, Zombie Infection, Sims, loads of Fishlab games, a silly GTA clone... Massive nostalgia hit I expected it just to be the nostalgia, but actually those games hold up pretty well especially considering the limitations of the platform! Certainly they are a breath of fresh air comp…
Modern mobile games are an absolute joke. Sure there’s some gems, but a vast vast majority even from the “big” names are just junk. Eg the official Tetris requires a monthly subscription to not have ads between EVERY game, other big names only let you play a single level then the rest cost money for each and every additional level, etc etc. Our “phones” are now more powerful than gaming PCs from not that long ago, an…
Mobile games are indeed 90% crap cash grabs and dark patterns. But given the absolutely immense amount of mobile games available today, those 10 remaining percent still contains an insane amount of good games.
Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"
#378I 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…
Pre-iPhone I used my Symbian phone as the GPS system in my car, using software called Route 66 and a bluetooth based GPS receiver.
The map data was all stored on an MMC card so it didn't need any GPRS data. I used both a Nokia 6600 and then a 6680 with the same software. https://www.pocketgpsworld.com/route66-mobile-britain.php
Only the bluetooth GPS receiver had to be kept in the windscreen, and both parts were small enough I could easily could take out of the car when leaving it.
I suppose it was slightly bleeding-edge stuff for it's time but it worked pretty well considering the capabilities of the device and was much cheaper than a dedicated GPS unit with no ongoing costs.
Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"
#379I'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…
Fame in gaming has largely moved into “content creators”. The most famous game developers are almost certainly YouTubers first and game developers second. There are some fairly big channels now that produce memey content about making games in nearly exactly the same way as people make memey content about Minecraft or Fortnite. People like danidev: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIabPXjvT5BVTxRDPCBBOOQ
I think you may have a point. I don't play Fortnite, but I know who Ninja is, and casual observers of the gaming world pretty much know his name regardless of playing fortnite. (Though he's not a game dev).
It is an interesting trend that players can now become more famous for playing a game than the people that create the game. However I think that's only possible with the advent of user-created content: Minecraft gameplay on YouTube ~2012-2013 was a big driver in Minecraft's popularity and catalyst for mote activity like that. I think gaming culture would have reached this point without Minecraft, but as it stands right now it was the foundation of the massive gaming channels and streaming.
Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"
#380I'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.
Very true. Atari did it deliberately with their devs. Probably to their detriment: Having big name devs with their own brands would only have brought more attention to the market. Who cares if they make they own game studio? Atari would still get royalties on cartridges sold.
With today's game studios though, they aren't the platform owner, so a game dev with a personal brand branching off to do their own thing is still a net loss for them. I wonder if they have rules in place about that sort of thing. I could even take the appearance of something benign & reasonable: "No one talks to the press, everything to the press comes out of PR & marketing"
If that's the case, there may very well be a dozen Carmacks in the big dev studios that made something seemingly impossible happen, and without whom their games would simply have died, or been flops.
Then again with that level of fame, failures hit the individual quite a bit harder than the dev teams as well. Look at someone like Warren Spector, Richard Garriot, or Dennis Dyack. I might read each of their examples as situations where their singular influence on their games and rise to fame ultimately lead to their failures & blame as well. It created a lot of pressure (somewhat self-imposed to be sure) to do something bigger & better each iteration that they eventually couldn't keep up. A situation made worse along the way by financial backers giving them too much money to develop, meaning the devs didn't have to think as critically about what to include and what to prune from games. It lead to games that were a mess of shiny features or broken promises lacking a solid core. Fame cuts both ways.