Pocketeers Limited’s BattleBallz Chaos featured on stage at Blackberry Devcon 2011

Well, I’m pleased as punch today, our game and in association with the Marmalade SDK, BattleBallz Chaos got featured on stage (on the big screen – man I seriously want one of those big babies!) by the posh smart men in suits 🙂 Here’s the proof:

Pocketeers Limited's BattleBallz Chaos featured on stage at Blackberry Devcon 2011

Oh yeah that’s right, come on, give me an “Oh yeah baby!”. BattleBallz Chaos for is available for Blackberry Playbook from Blackberry App World

Big thanks to Alex Caccia and the rest of the Marmalade team and Blackberry

Marmalade SDK Bitesize Tutorial – How to force a CIw2DImage texture to upload

Welcome to another bite size Marmalade SDK tutorial. I’ve seen this question pop up a few times in the Marmalade SDk forums so I thought that I would cover it here as a bite size tutorial.

You are using the Iw2D module to render handle 2D images, but you need to force the images to be uploaded to texture RAM before the game begins. You took a quick look at CIw2DImage to discover that it is in fact an abstract class with not a lot of info in there, except a few pure virtual methods  for retrieving width, height and the material associated with the CIw2DImage.

You can call GetMaterial() to return the material that makes up your CIw2DImage() and then in turn, call GetTexture() on the returned material to locate its texture. Finally you can call Upload() on the texture to tell Marmalade to upload it. Here’s a quick example code to show what I mean:

CIwMaterial* mat = your_iw2d_image->GetMaterial();
CIwTexture* texture = mat->GetTexture();
texture->Upload();

Don’t forget that unless you mark the texture as modifiable using texture->SetModifiable(true), the system will delete your pixel / palette data to free up memory.

Marmalade SDK Bitesize Tutorial – How to Launch an External File or Web Link

Welcome to another bite size Marmalade SDK tutorial.  This tutorial covers a cross platform way of opening up web links and other types of external file using the Marmalade SDK.

The Marmalade SDK contains a cool function called s3eOSExecExecute() which will launch the file / URL that you provide as a parameter using the underlying OS’s method of handling various file types.

In our example, we want to open up a web page URL. This type of system is great for deep linking your app or game to full and paid versions of free / lite apps or even providing a simple link to your other products or web sites.

The format of s3eOSExecExecute is as follows:

s3eResult s3eOSExecExecute(const char *url, s3eBool exit)

url – The URL you wish to open
exit – Should the app exit when launching the URL

Before you call this function you should however check to make sure that it is supported on the device using:

s3eBool s3eOSExecAvailable()