New article from Phantom...

[refractor]

[Phantom]

[Phantom]

The second article, covering fixed point math, is now available on http://www.flipcode.com . I included some source code.

[pazazzo]

nice articles phantom ! how about releasing your symbian hal, perhaps as "easyS60" ? anyway, i'm looking forward to read the rest of the series (btw., i'm not really sure but, it seems like there should be a left-shift with 4 instead of one to the right side at the end of the fixedpoint division approximation FPDIV)

[Phantom]

We plan to release something called 'Easym-b' soon. On Symbian, starting is a major pain, much worse than on the PPC.

[MirekCz forgot his pass..]

Docs are nice, althrought I'm a bit dissapointed.

There are tons of docs regarding stuff described by phantom (and he even talks about stuff he has described in his previous articles).

I was hoping that Jacco will write more about ARM and/or Symbian specific topics (texture mapping/persp.correct. tmapping optimizations, arm asm optiimzations etc).
The stuff he covered by now could be mostly described with few url links to his/other previous articles + few words of wisdom about additional, less known, optimizations he used.

Nothing really against those tuts, they are great, althought there are tons of fairly unknown topics on Symbian/arm programming (like fast tmapping) and as for now there's no word about it... Jacco describes stuff that is fairly well known to anyone that has done some programming in the days before pentium/hardware acceleration and this stuff is covered in many other docs.

One bad point is that instead covering how to write 32/64bit fixedpoint math lib with asm Jacco talks about how to use 32bit fixedpoint math and squeeze 3d engine into it (maybe Jacco's stuff is better, but I have got some very ugly previous experience with such stuff on PPC emu as my 3d engine died because of it in the end - fine quality and speed but small world size because of mul/div limitations with 32bits C math)


So to sum it up, tuts idea is great and Jacco has got some words of wisdom, but I think it could be much more useable if Jacco would concentrate on Symbian specific stuff/optimizations and leave the basic explanation for users to read from other docs if they miss this knowledge (as a set of links at the beggining)

Thanks for the nice tips as for now

[Dan East]

[Phantom]

Mirek, I see your point, however keep the following in mind:

I didn't write those docs just for Symbian people, it's 'mobile games coding'. That means that I have summarized my experiences with both PocketPC and Symbian. And when I'm doing 32bit integer math, that's because I don't want to use the heavily platform specific ARM assembly stuff for 64bit. As you know, I like writing HALs that make Windows, Symbian and PocketPC as much equal as possible; I hope that future devices will fit in the same strategy. The idea behind this is that I want to concentrate on coding, or more specifically: The 3D coding challenges, rather than platform specifics.

That being said, I know for some hardcore coders the articles have too little info. Rest assured, the following two articles have a bit more info, the last one even completely focusses on texture mapping. Still, it's generic stuff, so it might still not be your cup of tea.

I do however believe that someone new to mobile game development will have a pretty good idea of the pitfalls ahead after reading the four articles. That was the main goal, and also the reason for posting the articles on a generic game coding site like Flipcode.

I hope that explains things a bit.

- Jacco.

[bluescrn]

[Phantom]

[pazazzo]

[Phantom]

[pazazzo]

[eldo]

Phantom's version looks correct to me...

[Phantom]

Phantom's version is being used in a 3D engine as we speak.