Motorola Q and Games
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I have a Motorola Q and have looked into doing some gamedev for it. Well I find that GapiDraw is all funky with it, and so is DirectDraw due to no hardware acceleration.
Anyway, what are my options for GameDev on the Q? Are there any websites devoted to these sorts of things? I'm sure all I need is a couple example apps and I should be good to go on my side of things, but I haven't been able to find any examples that will actually compile for me.
Note that I already have VS2005 and WM5 SDK installed.
~WarDekar
You still have a lot of options.
The regular GDI and .net forms are available. In fact, these are better choices on the Windows Mobile & Windows CE overall market right now.
Generally speaking, gapi is slow on many newer devices, especially VGA 2003 devices and some others that happen to have slow drivers.
DDM has limited hardware support, and only exists in new devices.
Raw access is hit-and-miss, and there are a lot of different handhelds out there with problems on them. Some devices don't support it. Slight variation between devices causes additional issues. Some devices handle it through a fake buffer that ends up being slower than other access methods.
But...
GDI is everywhere, and accelerated on almost all hardware. The platforms with little or no GDI acceleration are also the platforms most likely to have issues with gapi and DDM, so it will work there, too. GDI done right will handle any screen orientation and dimention, regardless of it being QVGA, VGA, square, portrait or landscape; it can even work if bigger screen resolutions are used. GDI doesn't care if you are on a 15-bit or 16-bit display, an older 8-bit display, or a future 24-bit display.
The .net compact framework with forms is available on 2002 and later devices. If you wanted to target old devices, you would need to use the older eMbedded development tools and GDI would be the only option.
Since you are using VS2005, that means you are limited to 2003 and later devices. It seems as though they dropped the 2002 support, although it is probably there in the compiler options. Using .net forms has an added benefit of being able to compile and execute on your desktop computer (assuming you figure out the right compiler options). You also keep the benefits mentioned above with GDI.
Since your options (and your Motorola Q hardware) haven't changed due to the post, I suggest you look in to plain old GDI and forms programming and see where those take you.
There are a lot of web sites that can help you make simple games using GDI and winforms. Both of those are fairly easy to make games on.
The regular GDI and .net forms are available. In fact, these are better choices on the Windows Mobile & Windows CE overall market right now.
Generally speaking, gapi is slow on many newer devices, especially VGA 2003 devices and some others that happen to have slow drivers.
DDM has limited hardware support, and only exists in new devices.
Raw access is hit-and-miss, and there are a lot of different handhelds out there with problems on them. Some devices don't support it. Slight variation between devices causes additional issues. Some devices handle it through a fake buffer that ends up being slower than other access methods.
But...
GDI is everywhere, and accelerated on almost all hardware. The platforms with little or no GDI acceleration are also the platforms most likely to have issues with gapi and DDM, so it will work there, too. GDI done right will handle any screen orientation and dimention, regardless of it being QVGA, VGA, square, portrait or landscape; it can even work if bigger screen resolutions are used. GDI doesn't care if you are on a 15-bit or 16-bit display, an older 8-bit display, or a future 24-bit display.
The .net compact framework with forms is available on 2002 and later devices. If you wanted to target old devices, you would need to use the older eMbedded development tools and GDI would be the only option.
Since you are using VS2005, that means you are limited to 2003 and later devices. It seems as though they dropped the 2002 support, although it is probably there in the compiler options. Using .net forms has an added benefit of being able to compile and execute on your desktop computer (assuming you figure out the right compiler options). You also keep the benefits mentioned above with GDI.
Since your options (and your Motorola Q hardware) haven't changed due to the post, I suggest you look in to plain old GDI and forms programming and see where those take you.
There are a lot of web sites that can help you make simple games using GDI and winforms. Both of those are fairly easy to make games on.
Use DirectDraw to create a primary surface. Lock the surface to get a pointer to the pixel data, update the screen, then unlock it. This will be the fastest way to get raw access the display and will be supported going forward (GAPI is deprecated).
For 3D apps, use Direct3D Mobile. The driver on the Moto Q is highly optimized for the XScale CPU and should give you decent performance.
You might want to visit the developer's forums on pocketmatrix.com.
For 3D apps, use Direct3D Mobile. The driver on the Moto Q is highly optimized for the XScale CPU and should give you decent performance.
You might want to visit the developer's forums on pocketmatrix.com.
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