PocketMatrix

People,

Next Monday (estimated release date), there will be a new article on Gamasutra titled 'Cross-platform development of games for mobile devices'. The accompanying library has been added to SourceForge, the project is named 'MobileCore'.

MobileCore is a very small library that sits between the hardware (and libraries that sit directly on top of the hardware, like GAPI or PocketHAL) and the game application. It lets you develop games once, and compile them for many platforms. Right now MobileCore supports PocketPC and Symbian (and of course Win9x for easy 'emulation'). It abstracts the application entry point, display, buttons, stylus and sound system for the supported devices. More platforms can easily be added; a platform expert should be able to add support in a day. I am hoping that the Zodiac, GP32 and Tungsten-T will join in soon, as these devices have similar characteristics (as PPC & Symbian). MobileCore is thus NOT a game library; it's more 'EasyCE' for multiple platforms; game libraries could be build on top of this thing.

I hope this will help to get a broader audience for mobile games, and that it will free us all of the platform details that get in the way of cool game coding.

Check it out at http://www.sourceforge.net/mobilecore .
You'll want to read the article before diving in too deep; there's no documentation yet (although using it is not exactly rocket science).

The article is out early next week, but you heard it right here first.

Greets
Jacco.

So.. Um.. When it comes to the graphics part of the MobileCore API.. Does the API allow surface memory to be allocated on either sysmem or vidmem, or is it just another frame-buffer access layer where surfaces have to be allocated in sysmem and copied directly to the framebuffer? The reason I'm asking is that I believe most devices will provide some sort of usable HW acceleration with enough video memory next year (we are already seeing it with the 8mb vidmem Zodiac)...

By the way, if you need references in your article to similar libraries, you have GD who is also available for Win9x, PPC, Symbian and soon also Palm (the main difference being GD is a game library)... I guess it could be interesting to highlight why MobileCore is not a game library instead of just mentioning it (there are lots of reasons I can think of)...

cannot find this on Gamasutra

The article just went online on Gamasutra.