Notices

Reggie spotted a new presumably-accelerated Bounce on the Swedish N900 demo video, looks pretty nice and definitely a big step forward graphically compared to most Symbian devices.

http://maemotalk.com/2009/09/04/swed...0-walkthrough/

EDIT: Incidentally do press the video's full screen button if you have a fast connection, the video is surprisingly high quality.

Here are a couple of stills:

It looks good on a big TV too:


http://twitpic.com/g6smv
http://twitpic.com/g6slp

By far the best gaming platform Nokia have, having seen the piss-poor graphics capabilities of the X6 that they were touting.

The accelerometer in the n900 open new scenarios in the gaming on the maemo

The interesting thing is that S60 could have had similar graphics as standard by now if they'd kept fitting graphics hardware as standard on new models, which they did on the N93, N95 and N82 in 2006/2007. The original accelerated demo version of System Rush Evolution looked very good indeed, whereas the final non-accelerated release version played the same but was clearly not as good-looking.

I'm guessing the decision to use Maemo as Nokia's high end platform was made some time in 2007, because that's when Nokia inexplicably stopped including graphics hardware on S60 phones. The N82 was the last Nokia S60 model to have graphics hardware AFAIK.

Samsung has manufactured S60 phones with graphics hardware since then, including touchscreen S60 models, so it's clearly possible yet Nokia chose not to do any more, presumably because they had it in mind to focus entirely on Maemo devices for high end graphics, with S60 aimed more at mid-to-low range prices.

well, one things for sure..the N900 Bounce game is just amazing.. by the way, i assume it can be played without accelerometer too (if i dont want to be waving with the phone lol)?

The best thing is: If nokia manages to pull a nice Store (OVI) connection to Maemo, most of game developers (of great games for the iphones for example) will be able to port really fast their games to the N900, after all they are mostly native code with a GL ES engine

look at this one, I tested on my ipod touch 2nd gen :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAysP1HM6Z4

This will be nice, I am amazed how great the iPhone games looks, and we (symbian devices) barely could compete.. now it all changes, specially because it's the same "input" - touchscreen accelerometers.

Now we just need multi-touch )

BR

Marcelo

Indeed, that is the beauty of opengles 2.0. Anyway, game like that is no more difficult to do for n900 that it is for iphone. And porting of it should be a breeze.

well i hope that's true because that could be a whole lot of fun if the iphone games were ported to the N900.

Well... I am yet to find a single OSS iPhone game.

Also, iPhone 1 supports OGLESv1, while iPhone 3G supports OGLESv2 and OpenGLESv1; so I guess most devs use v1. But we're yet to see if the N900 supports OGLESv1.

Well, Kate once said: If you still would like use fixed function pipeline to port old not so advanced games, you can
still use OpenGL-ES1.x emulation libraries in maemo. I hope that we can get them in to next SDK release.

As for porting, maybe I missed something, but won't Objective C be a bit of a hindrance for would be porters ? The Maemo -> iPhone direction is easier as IIRC you have gcc and such, but I'm not sure about the state of Objective C on Maemo.