Native Development

[plungeint]

Hi,

I just downloaded the BB Tablet SDK and the BB Playbook emulator (that runs really smoothly by the way). Then my idea was to develop a game on BB Playbook. My first questiosn would be:

• I've seen that the native SDK works with OPENGL ES. Is there any recommended gamedev framework to deal with BB Playbook on native game development?
• When creating a new project on the SDK, there are several templates, what should I use?
• When I choose the OpenGL ES template, it is only available on C, and not C++, why?
• Is it there any get started on game development for BB Tablet guide?

Thanks!

[taylortbb]

There's a lot of different game dev frameworks that support the PB. Depending on what you're doing you may want to look at Shiva or Marmalade rather than building everything yourself. There's probably others too, but those come to mind.

[falo · Accepted solution]

Take a look at http://www.cocos2d-x.org/news/48

While the documentation needs some input, cocos2d itself has a lot of examples and references out there, the test suite is good and it's not hard to mentally jump from any cocos2d objc examples to the -x equivalents.

[plungeint]

Thanks guys, I guess the easier and cheaper to get started will be cocos, but other options are good aswell

[dtomilovskiy]

By the way, there is Unity as well. I guess the choice here is really what type of a game you are thinking about.

Also, check out gameplay. It is a free (and open source) game engine that is available here:

https://github.com/blackberry/GamePlay

[taylortbb]

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dtomilovskiy wrote:

By the way, there is Unity as well. I guess the choice here is really what type of a game you are thinking about.

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The issue with Unity is that it doesn't support publishing to Tablet OS. Right now the only way onto Tablet OS is through their Union service. But Union takes an additional 20% of revenue on top of the 30% App World takes, and there's no guarantee they'd even be willing to bring your game to PlayBook. I know it's not a RIM issue, but I wouldn't advise a dev looking to make a game for PlayBook to go the Unity route. RIM working with Unity to get Tablet OS as a fully supported platform would be welcome though.

[dtomilovskiy]

Yes, I recall this being brought up at GDC.

In such a case I would advise to take a look at the gameplay. It is a rather comprehensive engine.

[falo]

Maybe I'm being a bit dumb here, but I can't find any further information on GamePlay beyond links from the BB documentation. It probably doesn't help that it's a fairly common name when searching. Can you provide any more details on GamePlay beyond the git repo? Is there a blog? Roadmap? Forum?

The advantage I see of cocos2d-x (making the big assumption of 2d gaming here) is that there's a wealth of information and resources out there for it at your fingertips, and plenty on cross-platform implementation. At the moment the only cross-platform support mentioned on the github page is for desktop platforms.

[stevenhaggerty]

I think I'd just stick to using GLES (2.0 if you're Playbook only). The implementation on Playbook is pretty good and there's more GL samples out there than you can shake a stick at. The touch input stuff is very few lines of code which just leaves audio, which is always a pain. Do you really need an engine for a 2D game? As for portability, I've just ported Great Little War Game from Android native to BB native in short while so the GL stuff stands up well (shaders included) and the input stuff just dropped in.

You right about the documentation on Playbook, it's a bit threadbare.

Steve.

[falo]

The attraction of cocos2d-x for me is that I have very little time to do my own development, so a framework frees up some of that time. If I could spare the hours I would look at GLES, but I barely get enough time for sleep outside of office hours so it's a non-starter.

On a side note, glad to hear GLWG is coming to the PlayBook. Found that when playing it on my DHD I always wanted a bit more space and now I'm getting a PlayBook I can have that!