::scr horns of a dilemma

[Simon Wistow]

As some of you may or may not know - I'm a games programmer. It says so
on my business card and everything. So it must be true. Except I don't
get to play around with exciting shiny consoles or anything, I program
games for phones. Phones which aren't even out yet. Crap phones. I spend
my life hunch over a laptop (the LCD screen reduces flicker) staring a a
tiny 100x78 pixel screen coding in J2ME which is the crippled half
bastard son of the weeping sore language nown affectionately as Java.

So what's this got to do with dilemmas, horns or the kind of mailing
list that bandies around Plato like it was some kind of pop culture
reference?

Java phones are *terrible*. Java is terrible (at least/especially for
phones. interpreted OO languages are heavy and phones are, err, not).
J2me is a particularly bad form of Java.

This mainly because J2me (which stands for MicroEdition) is designed to
run on everything from smart cards, phones, PDAS, Video recorders and
fridges. I shit you not. So it panders to the lowest common denominator.

Which is bad.

Especially for games. 

<warning, here comes the science> 
For example J2me doesn't have things that you'd think were fairly
critical for games such as filled polygons, more than 5 buttons,
blitting routines, floating point ...
</jennifer aniston>

so, here's the crunch, and the ::scr relavent bit (probably). Various
vendors are releasing platofrm specific extensions which are
incompatible with not only other platforms but also different phones in
their ranges.

Sound familiar? If not do the words <marquee> and <blink> not strike
fear in your very soul?

So what's a boy to do - one the one hand sticking to none vendor
specific extensions means that games that look like this ....

http://thegestalt.org/screen.png

end up looking like this ...

http://thegestalt.org/screen2.png

and all I can really do is Yet Another Version Of Fricking Snake [tm].

On the other hand the Great Browser Incompatbilities still bring me out
in shivers. I once wondered if I could sue Netscape and Microsoft for
decreasing ym quality of life. Seriously. Maybe get in a class action
case on the back of the DoJ ruling.

And at least my game will run, untroubled, on a fridge.


So, the question I put to you, Vendor Specific Extensions - good thing
or bad thing?



-- 
: i'm satisfied ... yet still strangely outraged.