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Game graphics on Android phones

I've been playing around my newly bought Nexus One and one thing I've found is that while graphics and colours when doing most things in general are so vibrant and beautiful to look at, games look decidedly 2nd rate.
Why is that? Is that something to do with the hardware or the APIs provided by Google? It would be nice to see something like Plants vs Zombies on the iPhone. From my limited use I find the graphics on my Nexus One slightly better than the 3GS on everything except when it comes to games, where it is left far behind. I found that really weird.
On a related note, I'm no developer myself, but I'm of the opinion that the success of the platform will depend a lot on 3rd party development, which means a lot of support given by Google to developers. What's the situation like now? How easy/hard is to develop for Android phones and what are the scopes for improvement?

Bump.
Any opinions from Android developers on here?

its because pre nexus one/desire there was only one android phone which could even play good graphics and that was the moto droid .
give the developers some time ... now that more powerful android phones are coming out, we'll see more and more better looking games ... as an example look at raging thunder 2 ... you might not like racing games but that game has exceptional graphics
nothing as good as the iphone yet, because iphone always had a very powerful gpu from the get go so all of iphone game developers have had that much time to play around with them ... android just started getting powerful gpus
hope that answers ... and anyone with more knowledge, feel free to correct me if i'm wrong

alienwolf426 said:
nothing as good as the iphone yet, because iphone always had a very powerful gpu from the get go so all of iphone game developers have had that much time to play around with them ... android just started getting powerful gpus
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Thanks for the explanation, makes sense. Which new Android phones have good GPUs on board?

Watch out here comes the "Droids"
TT1986 said:
Thanks for the explanation, makes sense. Which new Android phones have good GPUs on board?[/QUOTE
Galaxy S doing video game demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpP5QljEqow&feature=related
Galaxy S vs. Iphone 4:
http://3gsiphone.com/jailbreak-and-...-vs-samsung-galaxy-s-video-review-part-1.html
Reading about GPU:
http://androidandme.com/2010/03/new...bird-chip-to-have-3x-gpu-power-of-snapdragon/
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jhnstn00 said:
TT1986 said:
Thanks for the explanation, makes sense. Which new Android phones have good GPUs on board?[/QUOTE
Galaxy S doing video game demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpP5QljEqow&feature=related
Galaxy S vs. Iphone 4:
http://3gsiphone.com/jailbreak-and-...-vs-samsung-galaxy-s-video-review-part-1.html
Reading about GPU:
http://androidandme.com/2010/03/new...bird-chip-to-have-3x-gpu-power-of-snapdragon/
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Whoa! That is good.
Excellent stuff, good times ahead then.
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its mostly due to the fact that a lot of older phones (eg. the htc hero) dont have gpus whatsoever. the moto droid had a gpu, therefore could run good graphics in a 3d game. the samsung galaxy S has a great gpu on the cpu die and will run some really impressive games on it, in fact, it could run much better looking games than on the iphone.

for a art developers view
Ok well I'm a 14+ year vet of games industry on console games, in technical art production, but my view would be the same as a programmer I would suspect. Just like when doing a multi-platform release back in the ps, saturn, n64, dreamcast etc... days, you dont really want to do lots of work for all platforms. Neither do you want to cut your biggest market chunk out by them not getting the experience others get with better hardware. This takes me back to PC days when we have powerVR primary GPU's, or ATI, or Nvidia, or matrox, well the list got big. The graphics capabilities sometimes had to be addressed almost as if they were different platforms (this is b4 HAL abstraction sweetness and todays DX domination). I suppose at the end of the day, I would not choose to dev only on android for the SGS, that cuts some 99% of the market out. What apple has done is have fixed hardware and Development LIBs for that hardware. This makes it very easy to give all iPhone users the same experience. With android, too many variances in hardware and capability, also maybe hits taken from phone operator system additions and services.
So in my opinion, you cant have such and open system that can have lots of variations and get games in numbers and quality that we see on iphone. Not cause android phones cant do it. Cause not all of them can etc, and it's too varied.
Just my opinion

deanwray said:
So in my opinion, you cant have such and open system that can have lots of variations and get games in numbers and quality that we see on iphone. Not cause android phones cant do it. Cause not all of them can etc, and it's too varied.
Just my opinion
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I see what you mean. It's a lot like Console vs PC isn't it? I'm a PC gamer but i can understand why publishers/developers prefer console because they don't have to deal with a large variety of hardware. In other words, optimizing gaming experiences on Android phones could be harder than on iPhones because of the same reason.
Lets hope the difference isn't too big though.

TT1986 said:
I see what you mean. It's a lot like Console vs PC isn't it? I'm a PC gamer but i can understand why publishers/developers prefer console because they don't have to deal with a large variety of hardware. In other words, optimizing gaming experiences on Android phones could be harder than on iPhones because of the same reason.
Lets hope the difference isn't too big though.
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Porting from PC to console and vice-versa is probably easier than iPhone to Android, though.
I remember Valve saying that porting The Orange Box over to the Xbox 360 was very easy. They said something like they put the PC code -- with a few changes like control configuration -- through a 360 compiler and the game was up and running.
Also, with the PC, you have just two major processor brands (Intel and AMD) and two major graphics card brands (NVIDIA and ATI). The APIs and stuff are also far more mature.

google could do what Palm did.
Palms PDK allows porting of iPhone games to the Pre in a matter of hours.

theineffablebob said:
I remember Valve saying that porting The Orange Box over to the Xbox 360 was very easy. They said something like they put the PC code -- with a few changes like control configuration -- through a 360 compiler and the game was up and running.
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That's probably because it's made in XNA or some other cross platform code. That's one of the things pulling me toward WP7 (that and Zune Pass ).
Devs can write one code base, and in a matter of days have it ported to all major Microsoft software. As an Android dev myself, that would be amazingly useful did I also produce desktop software. I mean think about it, write an app for PC, then also target XBOX360, ZuneHD, normal Zunes, and WP7 all with essentially one codebase with very few small changes between them. That's some amazing stuff.
I toyed with XNA before and it is a beautiful way to code. Not to mention that the C# it uses is essentially Java with a few modifications.

Is Android ever going to be a viable gaming platform?

Ok, I had a Samsung Galaxy S this time last year which I ended up returning within the 14 day "Trial" and went for the iphone 4 instead.
My main concern and the main reason I went back to Apple/ios was because of the fantastic developer support the idevices have, they have pretty much every major big name developer and all the indie developers making games and apps for the platform, this just wasn't the case with Android last year, I was soooo disappointed by the gaming side of things with android.
Anyway, a year has passed and i'm back! this time with an Xperia Play with the latest Android OS and i'm ready to see how much has changed in that year! but wait..... still pretty much how I left the scene a year ago with the exception of gameloft and rovio who now release decent games on the platform.
My questions:
Where are all the big name developers on Android? why aren't they here? will they ever be here? infinitly blade, plants vs zombies, real racing, field runners, we rule etc?
Where are all the great apps and games from the Apple App Store? surely its easy to port them over to Android? and the ones we do get look bad compared to the idevice versions even though our android devices are more powerful, why is this?
Have I backed the wrong horse again? I really hope not......
I love Android as an OS, very cool but I can't help but feel it is lagging so far behind in the app/game/appstore race that it can't ever compete now, am I wrong?
Our Android devices are very powerful, why are no games showing off our hardware? Asphalt 6 looks stunning on my Xperia Play and using the gaming pad is amazing but is that it?

1. Money. Still it's much easier to monetize your work in AppStore than in Android Market. First, Android community likes openness, free software, etc., but iPhone users... they could spend 1000$ for a featureless I'm Rich App ;-) Second, it's much easier to steal/pirate apps on Android.
2. Native development was neglected by Google for long time. Main effort was put into Java development and C didn't have access to many Android APIs. Recently Google has added most of required APIs, but...
3. Android devices are poorly supported by their manufacturers. If you want to use newest features in your app then you have to develop for <6 months old devices. And, as mentioned above, many features which are important for gaming were added recently.
4. Device differences. Even if all Android devices would be perfect and fully compatible with each other, there're still various screen sizes and resolutions, CPU/GPU power, etc. When you develop a game for iOS, you have to buy iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad and iPad 2, test it on these devices and set visual quality specifically for them, so game will run smoothly. If you want to develop for Android, you have to think of potentially every possible screen size, ratio and resolution, you have to test it on as much devices as possible and try to guess proper visual quality on a device or add feature for setting it by the user - as in PC games. It's much more complicated.
But I'm not a game developer, so maybe some of above problems aren't true and maybe there are more of them.

Brut.all said:
1. Money. Still it's much easier to monetize your work in AppStore than in Android Market. First, Android community likes openness, free software, etc., but iPhone users... they could spend 1000$ for a featureless I'm Rich App ;-) Second, it's much easier to steal/pirate apps on Android.
2. Native development was neglected by Google for long time. Main effort was put into Java development and C didn't have access to many Android APIs. Recently Google has added most of required APIs, but...
3. Android devices are poorly supported by their manufacturers. If you want to use newest features in your app then you have to develop for <6 months old devices. And, as mentioned above, many features which are important for gaming were added recently.
4. Device differences. Even if all Android devices would be perfect and fully compatible with each other, there're still various screen sizes and resolutions, CPU/GPU power, etc. When you develop a game for iOS, you have to buy iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad and iPad 2, test it on these devices and set visual quality specifically for them, so game will run smoothly. If you want to develop for Android, you have to think of potentially every possible screen size, ratio and resolution, you have to test it on as much devices as possible and try to guess proper visual quality on a device or add feature for setting it by the user - as in PC games. It's much more complicated.
But I'm not a game developer, so maybe some of above problems aren't true and maybe there are more of them.
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Thanks! I didn't want to sound negative but would love to see Android do well on the gaming side of thing, hopefully this will happen one day?

Plants vs Zombies is due to be released on Android in the next couple months.

technoplunk said:
Plants vs Zombies is due to be released on Android in the next couple months.
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Is that it?!

If you were a developer at Google.............

Hello everyone,
Just for the sake of fun. If you have been given the opportunity to decide the future of android, What would you do? Which feature do you want to see in android?
May be people @ Google are 'really' watching this thread. Who knows?
Shoot your opinions
PS: I would say, a multi user (logoff and on) feature so that one can change profiles in office and home. (Haven't seen this as native android feature)

Feature wise, I'd push for smoother graphics, put an end to the "iPhone is faster" trolls.

Smoother ...more exclusives to android.. game mostly ...as gamevil seem to stick every thing on iPhone first ..
Sent from my MT11i using xda premium

One of the things that holds back game developers is having to do extra work to support multiple GPUs (Tegra, OMAP, Adreno, etc). It would be nice if Android had something like DirectX on Windows where the GPU brand doesn't matter, instead the GPU is certified for a DirectX # level and can run all games up to that #.
There have been some good games out there that were Tegra only early on for example and when you see its incompatible with your graphically capable OMAP device its not good. Judging from the reviews left people don't like when this happens.

I really don't understand why android cannot run as smooth as iphone, i think it's really system problem rather than hardware's problem...

crazyricky said:
I really don't understand why android cannot run as smooth as iphone, i think it's really system problem rather than hardware's problem...
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Apple have a few phones they build inhouse, and create software and drivers for it, that they can constantly tune and improve.
Google on the other hand, have to support an unlimited amount of devices and drivers, so they don't get the same time to improve drivers. Not to mention you then get 3rd parties with their own skins and what not.
It's the price we pay for freedom

[Q] Transformer or Transformer Prime?

Hey guys,
So here's my dilemma. I was thinking of getting a netbook for professional purposes (word, mindmapping software and possibily vintage gaming) but I've com to the conclusion that most netbooks pretty much suck hardware-wise (can't even do HD video <.<).
So I took a look at both the Transformers, and with their keyboard dock they seemed like a perfect choice, for their size and usability.
However, the vintage gaming I'm looking for (that I'm willing to throw away at this point) was only available for Windows (mostly). So being that I'm possibly opting for an Android "tablet-book" I'm still wondering this:
Are the rumors that Windows 8 will be ARM-compatible and possbily will work on the Transformer Prime? If so I might get one. If not I'll possibly go for the original transformer. But that leaves me with another question:
Except for the quad-core is the difference from the Tegra2 to the Tegra3 really steep in terms of performance?
Thanks in advance,
K.

Dont hold your breath for windows 8. The rumor says its only going to be sold pre-installed on devices, and not available for download to other devices. And since it isnt open source, porting it to other devices would be quite tricky, and also piss microsoft off.
The Prime is faster, no doubt. But is it enough to justify the price differences? I dont think so.
The tegra2 can not handle 1080p movies. The prime struggles with them as well but can play most of them.
But in whole, it sounds like a tablet wont satisfy your needs, unless you got access to a windows PC you can use through remote desktop all the time.
A tablet can not replace a laptop/pc yet. They arent ment for that. Once win8 tablets start to mature, that might change. But that might take years.

Goatshocker said:
Dont hold your breath for windows 8. The rumor says its only going to be sold pre-installed on devices, and not available for download to other devices. And since it isnt open source, porting it to other devices would be quite tricky, and also piss microsoft off.
The Prime is faster, no doubt. But is it enough to justify the price differences? I dont think so.
The tegra2 can not handle 1080p movies. The prime struggles with them as well but can play most of them.
But in whole, it sounds like a tablet wont satisfy your needs, unless you got access to a windows PC you can use through remote desktop all the time.
A tablet can not replace a laptop/pc yet. They arent ment for that. Once win8 tablets start to mature, that might change. But that might take years.
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Before anything thanks for the reply, every input is useful
The point is, I don't need it to substitute my desktop PC (I have a gaming rig, it would be impossible xD), I do need it to be able to work on documents on the go, read stuff, and browse the web like it was a netbook, but without sacrificing the abitity to watch video like I would have on a netbook.
In terms of gaming I only really need it to run all Android games flawlessly

KezraPlanes said:
In terms of gaming I only really need it to run all Android games flawlessly
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That wont happen, for several reasons;
Gameloft, which has a big amount of good games, hardly supports the Transformers, forcing us to find the games by other means.
A lot of games is only coded for crappy phones with their low-res screens, making them unplayable on a tablet with a larger resolution.
If you want an android device that can play the majority of the games available, you're better of getting a high-end phone ... its a sad world we're living in...
That said, there is a lot of games available, but some takes a lot of time to find.
One example is Order & Chaos... It took me 2 weeks before I actually found a version that works on the TF101, and once gameloft decides to update the game - who knows how long it will take before it will work again.
We have a thread here that lists the gameloft games currently known to work on our TF101's. The list itself isnt updated in quite a while, but the last few pages lists some more games.
I think the Prime forum got a similar thread.

Goatshocker said:
That wont happen, for several reasons;
Gameloft, which has a big amount of good games, hardly supports the Transformers, forcing us to find the games by other means.
A lot of games is only coded for crappy phones with their low-res screens, making them unplayable on a tablet with a larger resolution.
If you want an android device that can play the majority of the games available, you're better of getting a high-end phone ... its a sad world we're living in...
That said, there is a lot of games available, but some takes a lot of time to find.
One example is Order & Chaos... It took me 2 weeks before I actually found a version that works on the TF101, and once gameloft decides to update the game - who knows how long it will take before it will work again.
We have a thread here that lists the gameloft games currently known to work on our TF101's. The list itself isnt updated in quite a while, but the last few pages lists some more games.
I think the Prime forum got a similar thread.
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Thanks for the advice again
But honestly I don't play Gameloft stuff because I hate their shanenigans of making crappy coded games that don't even work the same on two phones with the same hardware.
I'm talking more about many of the indie games that have been popping up on the Market from Osmos HD, to Avadon and Canabalt among many others.

Its a hard choice but if you want gps and great wifi the original tf is the choice.
Documents on the go no problems for me.
If you root and use custom roms and overclock the performance difference at the moment does not justify the price.
Gaming thats a hard one some might say games dont work or hd games are usually released for the prime etc etc. But for me i play ps1 n64 gameboy etc with a ps3 controller on my tf101 i also play sims freeplay and a load of other games that i got direct from the market. You may not get all games but i think the best part of say 4-5 hundred games would be enough for anyone.
The ability to hook it up to the tv and play ps1 games with opengl (makes the old graphics look way better) alone makes it worth loving my android tablet.
Also when i had to decide between netbook and android tablet the winner for me was the tf101 because i can get 18hrs battery life most netbooks i have seen are lucky to last 6.
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using XDA Premium HD app

I can watch videos fine on my transformer (I'm not really an avid video watcher who can ONLY watch things in super super HD, seriously, 720 is really good on a screen this small). My tablet is very useful because I mostly browse, read pdfs, and take notes. Sadly, I find that I'm using the keyboard less and less, since the only time I really use it is when I have to type up reports, and latex works better with a bigger screen so I don't even use the keyboard much then..

Is the OUYA game console pointless and/or doomed to fail?

(This was originally posted in a sub-sub-sub forum, but I don't think there was enough traffic to get any responses, so maybe it's better suited for this General section?)
I just wanted to bring up a few thoughts I've had about the upcoming OUYA console, and see what you guys think.
1. I still don't really understand how/why all of this couldn't have been handled by simply creating a GoogleTV-specific OUYA app...?
2. Besides the OUYA's dedicated game-centric market, and their custom controller, what does one really gain that is not already available in the Android ecosystem?
3. How do they plan to prevent their entire custom OS (Or their individual apps) from being ported to other Tegra-based GTV devices in the future? Or, given their outright support for hacking the device, would they even care?
4. And then there's this: Google reportedly making a Game Center for Android
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Google-reportedly-making-a-Game-Center-for-Android_id30026/
If one was to pair the above (hypothetical) "GTV Game Center" app with a Google-branded "Nexus Controller," wouldn't the entire OUYA become pointless? Would you prefer an app/service that is fully integrated with the entire Google ecosystem, rather than a custom version of the OS and functionality that are outside of (or weakly tied to) said ecosystem?
That said, I still plan to buy a OUYA, but only because I'm a sucker for shiny new toys -- especially of the Android variety! :laugh:
What are your thoughts? Am I "over thinking" this console? Do you think it will be made pointless by an evolution of the GTV?
I'm just looking for friendly debate, so please keep it civil...

It's $100, a lot cheaper than most phones capable of gaming. It's hackable, so rather than spending a bomb on a new phone to play the latest games, just add some more cpu/gpu for a lot cheaper. It has a controller, no more crappy touch screen controls, or spending a fortune on a PS3 controller.
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I guess my biggest issue with it is that they're leaving out the GTV capabilities. That just doesn't make any sense to me at all.
If the Vizio Costar switches to a Tegra3, they could simply add an "Ouya Game Center" app, and be done... in that single move, they'd make the entire Ouya console obsolete.

i feel like i'm the only person afraid of kickstarter. but, i think this thing will really only appeal to people that don't want to invest in sony or microsoft's new consoles.

I'm just waiting to see what Sony and Microsoft are going to bring to the table, hopefully we will see an Android LIKE experience with their next gen console's.
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I plan on buying this regardless in addition to the next MS console.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

They openly support hacking the console so any gtv apps/services they don't natively support we can always add in later. As for porting their OS it could be possible and I think they would care but honestly it would be a completely different experience compared to the console. For instance a tablet with the ported OS and bluetooth controller would be similar but possibly just not up to spec causing slow response time or crashing/freezing. it seems cool though and I'm all for it, especially since I saw it a while ago on Hackaday (that's how I heard about it).

Google TV's half-hearted Android port is too restrictive for me.
Lost faith in Sony after PS3 Linux fiasco, and BMG CD Malware Scandal. Microsoft Surface with Windows RT's "Secure Boot" is also too restrictive for me.
Lenovo's LeTV has full Android port and comes with game controller(s).
...So for me, it comes down to $1000 LeTV vs $99 OUYA ...until Google Game Center becomes available on tablets.

dbzfanatic said:
They openly support hacking the console so any gtv apps/services they don't natively support we can always add in later. As for porting their OS it could be possible and I think they would care but honestly it would be a completely different experience compared to the console. For instance a tablet with the ported OS and bluetooth controller would be similar but possibly just not up to spec causing slow response time or crashing/freezing. it seems cool though and I'm all for it, especially since I saw it a while ago on Hackaday (that's how I heard about it).
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The problem with hacking the GTV apps and functionality onto the Ouya is that they're not including the HDMI input that is required for actual GTV functionality. If they just added that one port, I think it would make a lot more sense, and it would have that much more potential...

Well again they support total hacking of the system so my guess is that someone will get it up and working with an HDMI port. Honestly my bet would be less than 2 weeks after release it'll either be posted here or on hackaday or both (here because it's an android console, hackaday because it's a hardware hack) so we'll really just have to wait and see but it's not out of the realm of possibilities.

its a waste of time the ouya, if i want a console id rather use the ps3 or xbox 360, and if i want android gaming, id rather game on the tube or train or bus on the way to work/home/whatever to pass the time with on my gs3 or one x,

it's a nice idea, but it will never compete with the 'big boys', android games just can't compare
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xd8 said:
it's a nice idea, but it will never compete with the 'big boys', android games just can't compare
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yeh they suck compared to the big boys, what a daft idea,
when portable devices can get real computing architecture (not arm, arm sucks) and decent battery life along with support for dx11+ style graphics, anti aliasiing, etc,. then this would be a big deal, right now, its just a waste of space

mox123 said:
yeh they suck compared to the big boys, what a daft idea,
when portable devices can get real computing architecture (not arm, arm sucks) and decent battery life along with support for dx11+ style graphics, anti aliasiing, etc,. then this would be a big deal, right now, its just a waste of space
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I'd like to see what the Ouya would be like with the new intel mobile processors, and yes.......... an HDMI port.
I'm not going to say the current Ouya will be a total bust, the funding says I'm not alone in that thought. I do see this taking over as the kids video game system, all those silly games kids download on their parents phones from the play store...for $100. Pretty decent.
The Xbox 720 and the PS4 will still be the dominant consoles though.......... it would be nice if Ouya's presence made them lower the future pricing; the slim PS3 coming out is rumored at $150.

I have a theory on what Google now plans to do with the Nexus Q: add their own Google Game Center app and release the Q as a Ouya alternative. Hell, they may even include OnLive and/or GoogleTV capabilities (if they add a second HDMI port).
Since it's a Nexus device, it would probably be even more hacker-friendly than the Ouya...
One can dream, right?