J2ME Game Development

J2ME Game Development A quick review of why mobile gaming is different from traditional gaming:

• Low Budget

• Small Development Team

• Technology is within reason and is manageable, no need for special equipment such photo imaging equipment

• Based on open standards

• Mobile phones by default are ready for multiplayer gaming

Development Tools

Some available platforms for mobile game development are:

• Java 2 Micro Edition TM by Sun MicroSystems – http://wireless.java.sun.com

• MoPhun – http://www.mophun.com

• Brew – http://www.brew.com

This not to be confused with mobile operating systems such as PalmOS and SymbianOS,

these operating systems themselves support environments like J2ME.

This book will focus on J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition). With that being said there are

several software development kits you can use. To help ensure your game will run on

different manufacturers and different models of mobile devices you will mostly like be

using more then one SDK. The main J2ME SDK is available from Sun Microsystems at

http://wireless.java.sun.com.

As well there are few IDEs available for J2ME development. Some of these IDEs

provide full integration options with other development kits. For example Sun One

Studio Mobile Edition can easily be integrated with SprintPC J2ME SDK, SDK from

Sun, SDK from Nokia and SDK from Siemens.

What Else is Out There?

Aside from the regular tools and IDEs provided by various software organizations,

manufacturers and carriers there are other tools/software packages that may be of interest

to you.

Though presently most games are presented with only 2D graphics due the constraints of

mobile devices there are higher end devices that are capable of 3D. As well as the

technology improves 3D will be common as it is now on both gaming consoles and PC

desktop.

There is JSR in progress that supports 3D graphics for J2ME. It is quite possible with the

next release after MIDP 2.0 3D JSR 184 Mobile 3D Graphics API for J2METM to find out

more visit http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=184 :

As well the widely used OpenGL now as mobile version named OpenES with focus on

providing 3D graphics for mobile handsets, for more information visit

http://www.khronos.org/embeddedapi/index.html. The company FatHammer,

http://www.fathammer.com, has integrated the OpenGL ES-accelerated OMAP platform

into their X-Forge 3D Game Engine SDK.

There is also the MoPhun 3D engine available at http://www.mophun.com.

As you can see 3D is may not be quite here yet for mobile devices but it is sure on its

way.

Beyond Stand-Alone Game

Aside from developing stand-alone games there are various other technologies that will

enable you to develop multiplayer games.

By default with J2ME you are able to communicate over HTTP/HTTPS. Another option

is to communicate using the Jini the surrogate J2ME architecture. As well if the carriers

support socket communication you are able to implement socket networking between

games. However, it takes a lot more then just the communication protocol, there needs to

be a gaming server that can handle and provide various features, some of these features

could be but not inclusive to the following:

• Game Lobby

• Game Rooms

• Track User interaction

• Authentication

• Chat Rooms

• Instant Messaging

• Monitoring and statistics Tools

The Game Room itself acts some like a mediator/traffic cop that relays information back

and forth to the clients and to the respective game in play.

It is definitely a lot of work to implement this. However, there are other companies that

save you the trouble with their already pre-made game servers:

• DemiVision –http://www.demivision.com (recently acquired by JamDat.com)

• MformaTM – http://www.mforma.com

• Xadra – http://www.xadra.com

• Butterfly.net – http://www.butterfly.net

• TerraPlay – http://www.terraplya.com

Aside from producing games for wide area networks you can produce games for personal

area networks, technology better known as Bluetooth. The idea is the same has a game

over HTTP but within a confined local area. Some great links to Bluetooth and J2ME

are:

• Zucotto Wireless – http://www.zucotto.com

• RococoSoft – http://www.rococosoft.com

Two other technologies that can bring mobile gaming a new twist is Peer to Peer

famously advertised by the success of Napster. For more information on Peer to Peer

using Java visit http://www.jxta.org and http://jxme.jxta.org/. Another interesting P2P

technology developed by Apple is Rendezvous that enables automatic broadcasting and

discovering services between clients/servers.