J2ME Game Development: Issues and Troubleshooting(TM) -The OEMs
by Massimo Perrone (Hanami Solutions)
2.0 The OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers)
As if there weren't enough many problems this way, some more emerge from
diversity introduced by mobile phone makers.
Let me clarify on this point. Most important players in the market like
Nokia, Siemens and so on, introduced customary APIs for the development
of mobile games on their platforms.
On one hand this is undoubtly a positive thing because it allows
excellent addictional features for our applications (like being able to
add real soundtracks to our games, support for vibration and backlight functions)
on the other hand it seriously spoil compatibility between different versions
of our software.
One have to face a choice, whether to support just one brand or to find a different
solution.
While anything done graphically with these APIs can be remade with custom code,
on the musical side things get quite complex.
Indeed J2ME doesn't feature specifical classes and methods for sound support and even if
Sun tried to solve this issue by releasing MIDP 2.0, what about the many platforms
supporting MIDP 1.0?
Few solutions are available. Most famous one is to use method
system.getProperty("microedition.platform")
everytime the program is initialized and examine returned string to see what platforms (Nokia, Siemens, etc) the device we're using belongs to and take our countermeasures.
This way for every specific situation we will use its own API according to its custom format
and handling all the addictional features like backlight and vibrations.
Next Page >>
|
| |
|