pouët.net

C++ and OpenGL on Windows Phone

category: code [glöplog]
Ok, this is not meant as a shameless plug, but I'm just really proud to work with great people like Niklas Nummelin (aka Flow^Array) who do crazy ass shit like this... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ69f1gdd64 - and I thought a this might be genuinely interesting for a lot of people here...
added on the 2012-03-26 20:40:33 by gammawave gammawave
I was just about to write the same thing.. Ok, we are both really proud of working with Niklas :D
added on the 2012-03-26 21:14:19 by ekoli ekoli
That's pretty cool :)
added on the 2012-03-26 22:12:17 by kusma kusma
looks pretty cool indeed!

out of curiosity, you guys that might know the market abit better, how big is the market for windows phone 7 apps these days? is it still quite irregular or has it started to reach a quorum worth developing for? comparing to android and iOS i mean.
added on the 2012-03-26 22:32:20 by psenough psenough
Interesting, I guess it's a wrapper layer that passes the openGL off to DX? Will it support ES2.0? If so that might make windows phone dev a bit more appealing, because (somewhat answering ps) it's not exactly big enough to be worth developing separately for so far :)
added on the 2012-03-27 02:05:48 by psonice psonice
psonice: No OpenGL ES 2.0 support since Windows Phone 7 doesn't support custom pixel shaders, only some shaders which Microsoft included.

The market for Windows Phone 7 is growing but it's not close to the giants of Android and iOS just yet. It's about +60k apps already and now people start buying the phones.. I haven't heard of any success stories making millions of euros on WP7 apps, but that might happen.
added on the 2012-03-27 09:23:28 by ekoli ekoli
Wait ... did I just read that right, you can't write your own shaders in WP7's Direct3D (I assume) port? Why on earth would *anyone* want to use that crap then?!
added on the 2012-03-27 09:52:56 by KeyJ KeyJ
Windows Phone 7 doesn't allow Direct3D, only a limited subset of XNA.
added on the 2012-03-27 10:19:07 by kusma kusma
Quote:
how big is the market for windows phone 7 apps these days?

5 or 7% I've heard, but they plan 14% this year. But there is only 60k apps, when you've got 450k apps on android, so you have 3 times less consumers, but 7,5 times less competitors... so actually more chance for profits.

... and claiming you can port your apps directly to the 3 smartphones oses: it owns.
added on the 2012-03-27 10:24:27 by krabob krabob
Aha. Limited subset of a limited subset of what the hardware is capable of. Nice move Microsoft...
added on the 2012-03-27 10:55:49 by raer raer
ekoli: STILL no shader support? That's seriously balls. If MS want to attract any serious game dev on their platform they need to recognise that without a LOT more market share they need to make it easy to port iOS/android code.

krabob: the numbers are never this easy. Take android: there are no real controls on the app store(s). Thus, you get a LOT of shovelware which very few people ever touch. Remove that lot from the figures and you have a platform with a huge number of users and not so many decent apps which should be ideal - yet it's still a lot less profitable than iOS.

I think it comes down to the customers and the platform too. Lots of people seem to buy low-end android phones and use them as a general camera phone - they won't buy apps.

Any figures on how many apps WP7 users actually buy?
added on the 2012-03-27 12:58:22 by psonice psonice
Pirating apps on Android is a lot easier than on iOS and people tend to spend less money on Android apps anyway.
added on the 2012-03-27 15:26:53 by raer raer
Yeah, that doesn't help. Fragmentation hurts plenty if you're not doing something basic too.

Then there's the problem of all the screen sizes, and making UIs that work on them all - google have provided some good tools to deal with it, but you can't really use them because most of the devices out there are on old versions of the OS. Which is why most of the tablet apps end up not designed for tablets at all.
added on the 2012-03-27 15:46:47 by psonice psonice
Phonegap looks pretty awesome, but I think it's not ideal for games etc.
Screen sizes are indeed a problem.
added on the 2012-03-27 16:42:06 by raer raer
raer: We are adding similar support as PhoneGap ( The W3C standard ) to web views and we have this other thing we are working on called Reload for faster development for HTML5 developers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evaCwmoxfbM

And regarding the performance of HTML5 as of today we did a quick test.. Seams like HTML5 is becoming really competent for games, at least for simple games. http://www.codefessions.com/2012/03/how-fast-is-html5-canvaspart-1.html
added on the 2012-03-27 17:44:21 by ekoli ekoli
Yeah so someone built a crippled OGLES implementation on a different platform. Big fucking deal.

added on the 2012-03-27 18:23:45 by superplek superplek
Quote:
5 or 7% I've heard, but they plan 14% this year.
Hah, as if. Reality is more like 1-2%, and that's on a good day. The only reason to develop for WP7 is if you have a stategic customer lined up already.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-mobile-deck-2012-3#-15
added on the 2012-03-27 20:35:44 by gloom gloom
@ekoli: Try rendering to offscreen or something, otherwise the devices will cap OpenGL framerates @60fps. Plus GPUs in phones are really powerful and can do much more stuff than a simple canvas...

The MoSync SDK is looking pretty sweet too I must say.
added on the 2012-03-27 21:38:02 by raer raer
Rumors say that native code support is coming to WP7 in next release. I assume that there's still really not much chance that there would be support for GLES.

But I guess it could mean support for DX rather than just the XNA? Does anybody have more info?

If normal DX API support will be there, then there is a great chance ANGLE will eventually allow using GLES as an API as well, like it already does on the desktop Windows.
added on the 2012-03-28 15:58:30 by tonic tonic
i'm surprised no random pictures have reached to this thread so far.
added on the 2012-03-28 16:15:36 by nystep nystep
[image]http://static.businessinsider.com/image/4f6b70d969bedd9c470000c8-915/slide-121.jpg[/image]
added on the 2012-03-28 17:03:18 by psonice psonice
Well, you get the idea.
added on the 2012-03-28 17:03:35 by psonice psonice
psonice: that's not even remotely random :)
added on the 2012-03-28 19:55:12 by gloom gloom

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