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Posts: 4,384 | Thanked: 5,524 times | Joined on Jul 2007 @ ˙ǝɹǝɥʍou
#188
An interesting article by J Carmack about developing on iOS and Android, mobile gaming, etc:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/11/post-8.ars

JS: With Android, you guys had said last year that you were testing out Android, and doing some spot checking...

JC: It wasn't actually last year. It was couple of months ago. I've actually got the Android dev kit installed on a few platforms down here. The official word here is that we are definitely going to get some games compiled on the Android platform, but we are not yet committed to selling something on the Marketplace. Because I'm honestly still a little scared of the support burden and the effort that it's going to take for our products, which are very graphics-intensive.

The iOS platform has really been a pleasure to work on compared to all of the... half of the reason for us ditching the old feature phones was that it was so much more pleasant to develop for iOS. And I fear that we would be slipping back into some of that quagmire on the Android side of things. But there's no doubt that the installed user base is huge, and is getting larger all the time. So it's something that we'll have to keep an eye on. But it's not yet clear whether we're going to have this Rage project available in the Android Marketplace or not.

JS: OK. So you could say that Apple's platform is more console-esque, I suppose.

JC: Yes. The HD version of Rage is 1.4GB installed, and all the world geometry is using 2-bit PowerVR texture compression. If we went to one of the other platforms that's not PowerVR-based, we'd be stuck with a 4-bit texture compression format, and that pushes the size over 2GB. And the Android Marketplace doesn't even let you download more than 20 or 30MB, and you have to end up setting up your own server and doing your own transfer for all of that. Dealing with the user interface of managing space... there's a lot of things that happen automagically for us on iOS that we'll have to deal with particularly on the Android space. And that's not a lot of work that's going to be huge heaps of fun to do. It's going to be dreary, tedious work that I would certainly push on somebody else personally, but I'm not sure that even as a company it's something that we want to be involved in.

Even in the old days of the feature phone world, we always had EA Mobile or JAMDAT to build the 300 or 400 SKUs that they had for all the worldwide feature phone splits that we had from our four base versions. And we may yet wind up partnering with somebody else to do that level of broad support, but that's a little less satisfying when we're doing something that's pushing the limit graphically, because you don't have a second-tier company port your stuff to other graphics architectures and expect it to remain cutting-edge.
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