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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"

#391

Post by Nexxxeh »

asdff wrote: post #253
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…

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 UK, we were reminded to clean the inside of the windscreen to remove the telltale suction cup marks, so thieves wouldn't assume there was likely a satnav hidden in the glovebox or boot. (Windscreen = Windshield, Boot = Trunk)

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

#392

Post by asdff »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #274
asdff wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPS navigation is 90s tech, though. I had garmin barking turns at me in the early 2000s same as siri today. In fact usually better reception than my cell phone if it was a clear day, since cell coverage is still terrible where you really need need it out in the boonies where gas stations are miles and miles apart.

Devices like the Garmin [0] were chunky though, weren't they, like a few cm thick, even compared to phones of the times they were big. And to my [limited and shaky] recollection people had car mounted antennae for GPS (in the late 90s) because they worked poorly without it? The first retro-fittable GPS was in 1997, the Alpine CVA-1005 [1], which weighed >3kg and had a display of 26cm across; it connects for nav to a…

Chunky doesn't matter for a car GPS. They sit on your dash, not in your pocket. For my old garmens, the weighted sandbag mount they used to hold the device onto the dash was honestly less frustrating than a suction cup that falls of the windshield down to your feet while you a driving on the highway.

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

#393

Post by asdff »

drewmol wrote: post #263
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.

Regarding point 2: When I worked for a valet parking company not too many years ago it would astonish me how many people would 'remember' they must secure their GPS in the glove box, despite leaving much more expensive items like iphones/laptops/purses/wallets in plain sight strown around within their vehicle. They were an easy and common theft target at one time I guess .

Anything in a car is a theft target. I've had a window smashed so someone could steal my $7 knockoff lightning cable.

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

#394

Post by lostgame »

cryptoz wrote: post #174
lostgame wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notch ruined his popularity tho by being a total bigot and jerk. :/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson#Controversy He's said some truly awful things. It's too bad people are downvoting you - this is part of the story of gamedev. Carmack would never say these kinds of things. Persson did. One is a famous and well-known and loved developer, the other is relegated to parroting talking points of alt-right/Nazi discussion boards and does not associate much with the rest of socie…

Well; and when it boils down to it, what did Notch even really do for programming in general?

Minecraft is incredibly popular and very well made; but in no ways is it revolutionary or game-changing for the industry in the way Wolf3D or DOOM was.

There is essentially the game industry before and after DOOM.

Quake, similarly; changed the game; and, in fact - the engines for Quake/II and DOOM/II would go on to be the engine behind a quite massive quantity of games in the 90’s.

And then there’s Carmack’s massive contribution to FOSS by allowing us inside the code to learn how the craziness was constructed...

Honestly, there are only a handful of people in the world who even had the chance to make that kind of impact.

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

#395

Post by tylerhou »

theli0nheart wrote: post #285
tylerhou wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not completely wrong. Crowdfunding a product is not the same as purchasing that product because often people only decide to donate because the resulting product is free. (For example, I give $5 a month to Lichess, but I am unwilling to pay for a Chess.com subscription.)

I can understand why one would want to donate if you find the product useful, but donating because it’s free doesn’t make any sense to me. Could you elaborate?

Lichess is not for profit, so donating to Lichess means that my dollar goes "farther" for infrastructure & helps subsidize the website (which has many features) for other people who may not be able to pay. The main developer only pays themselves $56k a year, when they could easily be making $300k+ in the valley.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSk...

Chess.com is for profit, so they have to maintain some profit margin and lock features behind paywalls to incentivize people to pay. The free experience is worse than Lichess.

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

#396

Post by Tijdreiziger »

hnjst wrote: post #335
wolverine876 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm also not aware of net neutrality being protected in Europe yet. I think I recall ongoing initiatives aiming at that but I'm pretty sure even these don't cover cellular data networks. I think that, for example, plans including unmetered access for specific services are still a thing (say unlimited Facebook usage, exempt from regular data plan limits).

> I think that, for example, plans including unmetered access for specific services are still a thing (say unlimited Facebook usage, exempt from regular data plan limits).

Ah yes, the infamous 'zero rating'... this is currently the only hole in the net neutrality regulation. However, apart from that, net neutrality is indeed a legal right in the EU.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...

https://berec.europa.eu/eng/document_register/subject_matter...

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

#397

Post by pjmlp »

astrange wrote: post #387
kaba0 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, C# is the best language to write a phone OS in if you want to go out of business.

Other languages need special hardware to beat C#, so I guess the language wasn't the issue.

https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages

https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/11/m1-memory-and-performanc...

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

#398

Post by pjmlp »

astrange wrote: post #372
kaba0 wrote: post #364

Earlier 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,…

Java and .NET also have weak references.

Also C# can do everything that Objective-C is capable of, provided one actually knows how to use the language.

CPython uses a mix of refcounting with a cycle collector tracing GC, other Python implementations use tracing GCs.

The language does not specify GC semantics and counting on them is a recipe to break code when moving across implementations.

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

#399

Post by pjmlp »

theintern wrote: post #354
grishka wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a daemon in Symbian that would query the cell id and open up a socket server to give it to the J2ME app Why not just make the entire app native in Symbian if you require it anyway? Or did the Symbian SDK suck even more than I remember?

I tried to do a college end of year project in Symbian, and couldn't get anything to work for months. This was likely a combination of lack of ability as much as the SDKs problem, but it definitely was not novice friendly. I pivoted to J2ME with about a week to go in the project and managed to get an MVP working in time, after 3 months of wrestling with Symbian.

Ex Nokia here, yes the Symbian SDKs required high comfort with C and C++ development environments on Windows, then there was Symbian C++ dialect.

Also it did not help that the SDK was rebooted like 4 times.

Initially based on Metrowerks, coupled with a mix of Perl and batch files, rebooted twice into Eclipse based IDEs, and finally the QtCreator initial effort before the burning platforms memo happened.

Still, it was still much more friendly than dealing with NDK issues on Android.

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

#400

Post by pjmlp »

taneq wrote: post #366
meheleventyone wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I read the J2ME spec, looked at the procedure to draw an array of pixels to the screen, and noped out of there. Browser Java was bad enough, but J2ME? I wasn't gonna do that to myself.

What was so hard about it?

http://www.j2megame.org/j2meapi/Nokia_UI_API_1_1/com/nokia/m...)

http://www.j2megame.org/j2meapi/Nokia_UI_API_1_1/com/nokia/m...

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