A little J2ME 3D engine i wrote...

[Bad Sector]

Nothing really special, a basic raycasting engine, without floor or ceiling textures, no objects and very basic (read: crappy) collision detection. But hey, it works very fast on my 6600 (although i suspect that this is because this phone has a very fast CPU, not because my code is extremelly optimized - because it isn't ) and it impressed my sister who spends a significant part of her money for downloading J2ME games on her Motorola phone.

I'll put a download link and more shots once i put objects in there. It's not hard, but i preferred to play some Tomb Raider AOD instead (i got this game with my GFX card back when i bought my PC, but never saw it...).

[Chubz]

Great job man.  

I've been really impressed with your work on FPS engines - both 2d and 3d.

[AssKoala]

Do you intend on ever building a larger project and completing it?

 It seems like wasted effort and talent to constantly release small "technology demos" so often.

Ever considered working on some of the many Open Source 3D engines?  You'd actually be doing something you can say "hey, I did that and look its being used in a game!" instead of so many small demos.

I understand you say "you do it for fun", but who's to say work on those isn't fun?

Or do you think you're not up to the task?

[Bad Sector]

@Chubz:
Thank you .

@AssKoala:
I find it more fun to work on my projects

My major problem is that i'm alone and i can't create everything alone. I want like crazy to work with someone (or in a team) making a game, but it's very hard to find such a team there where i live. And even if i could find, it's even harder to find someone to fund the game's development in Greece - which i think is the no.1 stopper for everyone in Greece working on game development industry.

I know some talented coders who can do lots of things, a few of them, such as HarKal who made the Sylphis engine, are extremelly talented, but even if those people exist, no one willing to take the risk and fund the development of a game can be found.

That's why Greece has inexistant game development iindustry. Sure, there are a couple of companies, such as Anima, but they're small and already "full of coders".

In end, i just don't want to be the only one working on something. In Incomplete Undead Engine's sources, the map, textures and models are all made by me and i had some other models in my hard disk. It's so hard to do everything by yourself, i don't want to mess with big projects alone anymore.

By all that i don't mean that i can't do the programming work; in that aspect, i prefer to work alone than with others, at least when it comes to the engine. But i prefer to NOT have to do the art and sound (i'm ok with some level design, though, that's somethnig i find fun).

Anyway, these are some random thoughs on why i'm not working in big things. There may be other reasons that i can't answer or i don't know.

PS. I'm gonna try and make a full game of that engine, though.

[Bad Sector]

Better texture mapping, objects, doors and an editor that is not shown here .

[Rizimar]

Those screenshots really remind me of Wolf3D...

[Bad Sector]

It uses raycasting, like Wolf3D
It uses scaled sprites for objects, like Wolf3D
It has blood and bones, like Wolf3D
It has bricks in walls, like Wolf3D


... i wonder why ?

[Rizimar]

That's my point. Switch it up a bit

[warlordQ]

The second screenshots look much better... what is the overal file size of the game ( including textures, graphics, sound, exe... everything )?? does it clock in at 400 Kb or less... what are the restrictions on your phone ( eg: Game size limit )??

The foma i-appli games must be less than 100 kb... however data ( graphics, sounds, etc ) can be downloaded from the net, and theres an extra 300 kb storage for the data.. so all up a game can fit into 400 kb... however i-appli has another cool feature that can overcome the 400 kb size limitation ( street fighter II used this appraoch ) you can download extra data after you completed a few levels... i-mode mobiles are always on the internet, so downloading data of the net is no problem...

[Bad Sector]

The second screenshots look much better... what is the overal file size of the game ( including textures, graphics, sound, exe... everything )?? does it clock in at 400 Kb or less... what are the restrictions on your phone ( eg: Game size limit )??

There is no restriction on the game size. The restictions are on the formats: wall and objects must be 32x32 (because of hard-coded bit shifting). Worlds must be 64x64 (again because of hard-coded bit sifting and memory allocation). There is no restriction on how many textures or worlds can be there. Given that a world is 4kb uncompressed, you can put a lot of levels in there (i assume that 20 levels won't take more than 15-20kb compressed). Textures take around 2kb each, but that's with using a PNG file for each texture. I'll use a different texture storing scheme when other issues are solved.

The foma i-appli games must be less than 100 kb... however data ( graphics, sounds, etc ) can be downloaded from the net, and theres an extra 300 kb storage for the data.. so all up a game can fit into 400 kb... however i-appli has another cool feature that can overcome the 400 kb size limitation ( street fighter II used this appraoch ) you can download extra data after you completed a few levels... i-mode mobiles are always on the internet, so downloading data of the net is no problem...

THat's nice . I have some outdated material stating that the iAppli games had to be 10KB so i never took these mobiles too seriously. Are they more "MIDP"-compatible nowadays or you still have to use NTT's API? In other words: how easy will be to port my engine to iAppli?

Currently the engine is 36kb, including all data and the single world. I think that this is way too much given what it does now, but i think that i can keep the game below 128KB.

However, i still haven't decided what game i'm gonna do. It may be futuristic or medieval, action or RPG, whatever. I'm still working on the engine .

[warlordQ]

THat's nice . I have some outdated material stating that the iAppli games had to be 10KB so i never took these mobiles too seriously. Are they more "MIDP"-compatible nowadays or you still have to use NTT's API? In other words: how easy will be to port my engine to iAppli?

ahh yes those phones are way old, over 2 years at least... my phone has 400KB max...
iMode phones run on the J2ME api, but the phones themselves support more functions, so you need the DoJa SDK with emulator... portability wise its probabaly the same...

more info including the SDKs and emulators can be found here:
http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/p_s/i/java/index.html#architecture

[Hugo]

cool,

I might cut you a deal if you like. I've got my own mobile publish/development company for mobile games.

And I think I can use your engine.

the game I want to use it for is an oldskool FPS with a license.
although I can't tell you which one, just yet.

I developed a complete new 3D engine for midp1.0 s40 phones
which is still the mass market. But it's slightly outdated on
serie60 phones, so your engine could come to good use.

I could write a new engine for s60 myself. But that would cost
me a lot of time and stuff.

so If your engine is portable to other systems and :

- doens't use the nokia lib
- uses midp1.0 or midp2.0
- complete game under 160kb

I think we could make some great stuff !

[Bad Sector]

The problem with MIDP 1.0 is that it doesn't have direct screen access. If you want that, you need to use vendor-specific extensions. Currently i use plain MIDP 2.0 (no vendor-specific extensions), but since some Sereis 60-based phones (and many Series 40 too...) have only MIDP 1.0, i'll make a version of the engine to use the Nokia UI framework. Of course the renderer will be independent of the interfacing API (and the ProGuard obfuscator does a good job of optimizing, obfuscating and minimizing the size of your JARs... the engine currently with all images and such is around 60KB but after ProGuard is around 48KB).

I would like to see some screenshots of your MIDP 1.0 engine. I was thinking about making a MIDP 1.0 engine that would look similar (but a bit less good-looking, because of the limitations), but i think that MIDP 1.0 is an API that fades away (fortunatelly) and even if there are some MIDP 1.0 phones in production, they're not powerful enough (in CPU horsepower terms) to support a complete 3D game engine (excluding the first editions of Series 60, of course).

From a size point of view, i'm trying to fit everything under 128KB, which i find quite possible, given that without trying i've had a world with a basic HUD (not shown in shots), 15 textures, weapon (a hand with a knife) and a few object and all that in 48KB obfuscated.

I have a game idea in my mind and this is what i'm gonna make now. When it's finished i'll go and find some publishers to publish (non-exclusivelly) my game. But to be honest, i have no idea when it comes to that part .

And besides.... the game and the engine still need a lot of work (especially the engine). I'm not gonna do the same mistake as i did with Nikwi: i will not put time constrains on myself and i will not release until all issues have been addressed.

[Hugo]

ok.. cool. Just a few tips if you want to get your game published :

- don't use the nokia API :

  because then the game would only run on limited systems.

- make a midp1.0 version :

  same as above the s40 midp1.0 phones are still the mass market.

- this are the industry standards for mobile game sizes :

  s40 (slow) - 64kb
  s40 (fast) - 100 kb
  s60 (slow) - 100 kb
  s60 (fast) - 150kb

you can't just pick one; you'll need game-versions that suit all these size-version. Or it won't get published.

and make your engine portable. A standard mobile game should probably support around 200 different phones (at least).

if you do all of this, you can make around 40.000 euro.

good luck

[Rizimar]

40.000 euro?

Bad Sector, DO IT