POLL: Which Platforms would you like to see IwGame Support?

Hi Everyone,

We are looking to propagate the IwGame engine beyond the platforms currently supported by the Marmalade SDK and as such we are considering porting IwGame to a number of other platforms in the near future. Which platforms would you like to see support for the most (you can select up to 3):

[poll id=”4″]

When we begin porting, some things will unfortunately change as we would need to abstract all Marmalade specific functionality away from the engine to enable easier porting. Mostly this will involve hardware specific functionality and replacement of things such as resource groups. We will however do our best to minimise the disruptions.

Porting will begin when we reach around v0.50, so hopefully in a few months time.

If you are interested in porting IwGame to a different platform then please let us know.

Thanks for voting!

Marmalade SDK v6.0

I was pleased as punch this afternoon after I visited Marmalade’s web site. Why you may ask? Well, the simple answer is that they have updated their road map giving us a sneak preview of what’s to come this year. The main thing that I am happy about is the fact that the first release due in Q1 is entitled “Web Marmalade”. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that this is targeting the web as deployment platform, which is even more awesome than the $25 credit card sized Raspberry Pi! (Think that we are going to have to name this one Awesomade!).

Anyways, hers a short extract from Marmalade’s release page:

“Hybrid Applications, Enhanced Native UI and support for new platforms.”

Yummy, eh? Well what could these features mean?

  • Hybrid Applications – Could we be talking hybrid web / native applications? Does this mean some kind of integration with Google’s Native Client (NaCl) – Like the way Google used the chemical name for salt, makes it nice and memorable. or maybe Marmalade can target HTML 5 some how?
  • Enhanced native UI – I think that we can safely assume this will include support for many more native controls?
  • New Platforms – Ok, it’s obvious what this means, but which platforms? Would be fantastic to see support for Raspberry Pi and Windows Phone 7, although I think WP7 is a closed system so maybe not. What other platforms could we see Marmalade support?

Feel free to leave your own speculations as a comment.

Raspberry Pi – The $25 Computer

Want to begin raising awareness of a new computer that’s coming out very soon called the Raspberry Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/). It’s basically a $25 credit sized computer that plugs into a display / keyboard etc.. I like to call it mini-awesome!

The computer is reported to have better performance than the iPhone 4S. Heres the basic specs:

  • The SoC is a Broadcom BCM2835. This contains an ARM1176JZFS, with floating point, running at 700Mhz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU is capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s. It has a fast 3D core accessed using the supplied OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG libraries.
  • RAM 128MB (Model A), 256MB (Model B)
  • USB Ports: 1 (2 on Model B)
  • Video Outputs: Composite RCA, HDMI
  • Audio Outputs: 3.5 mm jack, HDMI
  • On-board Storage: SD / MMC / SDIO card slot
  • On-board Network: None (Model A) , 10/100 Ethernet (RJ45) (Model B)

And its small enough to fit in your wallet! Like I said mini-awesome

We are so impressed with this little marvel that we are considering porting the IwGame Engine over to enable hobbyist and indie developers to get games up and running quickly on the platform.

Would like to hear your thoughts on the Raspberry Pi