Category: Gaming

ATI’s New Mobile Graphics Chip

ATI have unveiled their latest mobile graphics chip – the Radeon Mobility 9800. The DirectX 9 card is actually based on the new Radeon X800 core, and will first appear in Dells Inspiron XPS and Inspiron 9100.

Graphics capabilities have become far more important in recent years due to three factors: screens have become far better, good TFT screens are cheaper, and many people are buying laptops not just for business, but because they don’t have enough space at home for a full sized PC. And many of those people want to play games.

“Thanks to the new Mobility RADEON 9800, the Dell Inspiron XPS is the first laptop in the world with the power to run the Splinter Cell 3 E3 Weather demo at above 30 fps.” said Dany Lepage, Splinter Cell 3 lead programmer at Ubisoft’s Montreal studio. “The strong performance of the Mobility RADEON 9800, with antialiasing and the widescreen display of the Inspiron XPS, should allow players to experience Splinter Cell 3 in the best possible conditions.”

“ATI continues its outstanding graphics performance with the MOBILITY RADEON 9800 and enables us to be more creative with the visual effects in our games,” says Peter Molyneux, founder of Lionhead Studios. “Gamers can now experience the advanced 3D graphics in applications like Black and White 2 previously available only to desktop users.”

The Mobility 9800 has eight pixel pipelines and uses ATI’s Smartshader technology. A powerful graphics processor will basically eat your laptop battery in one gulp, but ATI have developed Powerplay to make sure you can actually play Splinter Cell past the loading screen.

Paradoxically, the chip runs at 100MHz less than its predecessor the 9700, but it has a staggering 110 million transistors – more than twice that of the previous offering.

Mobility Radeon

The IBC Digital Lifestyles Interviews – Simon Perry – Part I

This is the first in a series of eight articles with some of the people involved with the Digital Lifestyles conference day at IBC2004.

We interviewed Simon Perry, the executive producer of the Digital Lifestyles theme day, in a two-part feature that covers on the makeup of the day and question him convergence and other aspects of the media. He publishes Digital Lifestyles magazine.


Fraser Lovatt: Tell me about the four discussion sessions at IBC this year.  What are they about and who’s speaking at them?

Simon Perry: When the Digital Lifestyles day was introduced at IBC last year, my aim was to set the scene – to signal the change in the content industry. This year builds on that, by highlighting four specific areas that merit closer attention by the creative, business and technology people.

The day will inform the delegates on the new types of content possible, how to get paid for it, where you can deliver it and the business models around it.

The first session is titled ‘New platforms, new content’.

It is set in the context that, with new content delivery methods comes new forms of content. It’s chaired by Ashley Highfield, director of New Media & Technology at the BBC, and will create a discussion between some of the most experienced and forward-thinking Games, Film and TV people. In each of their fields they are bringing together different strands of content, creating something that couldn’t have existed previously, such as content that migrates between platforms, creating united content.

The second session is about getting paid for content. Up to now, the industry has been focused on protecting the content that they have, which is understandable and technology companies have been more than happy to assist them.

I feel this is a distraction. The really key part is how the consuming public are going to pay for content that they think is worth paying for, whether they receive it to their mobile phone, their TV, via broadband to their PC’s or through an adaptor on to their TV. The methods of payment are as diverse as the delivery methods.

The panel brings together the knowledge and experience of people who are successfully receiving payments from the public for text and video content; others offering payment systems that take small amounts, less that a pound/dollar, online and others that use mobile phones to make payments.

Tim Jones, the CEO of  Simpay will be on the panel. Simpay was brought to life by the four major mobile phone networks in the UK. The first stage of their service offers the phone-carrying public to pay for phone delivered content – catching up with the currently favoured premium-rate SMS charging. The next stage is – and this is where it becomes a more interesting example – allowing you pay for any types of content, as well as physical goods from shops, using your phone. It is something that has been theorised for a long time and Simpay appear to be pulling it together now. Tim’s background is particularly interesting. He co-invented Mondex, which as we all know, was the first form of public e-cash in the UK.

The third session is chaired by Ken Rutkowski of Ken Radio, and is about informing the content creators about the increasing range of platforms that are available to them for distributing their content. Within the industry there are different stages of knowledge, expectation and experience of what digital lifestyles will mean to the creators of the content, as well as the public. In this third session they will explore what roles different media play on different platforms and the effect it is going to have on the type of content people produce. Ken’s enthusiasm will lift the best out of the panellist.

The forth session is future business models chaired by media journalist, Kate Bulkley. It will explore the models that will run aside 30-second spot ads; mobile delivery; gaining benefit from efficient delivery to different platforms; generating new revenue from TV. There’s a lot of innovation in this area.

What does convergence mean to you? What’s your internal definition of it?

It’s an interesting word. It’s been around for a long time – and increasingly, over the last six/nine months it has become to mean anything that any marketeer wants it to mean. The original definition saw all devices being morphed in to one device. It’s clear that there won’t be convergence to that extent. It’s becoming less defined. The more it enters everyones vocabulary, the wider the definition becomes. Perversely it’s definition is diverging.
 
The convergence that Digital Lifestyles magazine focuses on, is how the influx of technology into the creation, transfer and reception of media content is changing the industry. Where media and technology touch, is what’s of interest to us, and the impact it will have.

There is an argument that media has always been a technological activity. From first workings and marking things on cave walls to the development of perspective, to the first film studios to television. It has always been technology-led.

That is probably true. Well it’s not probably true – it is true. The definition of what is technology is a sliding window, isn’t it? Pens, paper and the printing press were all once thought of as advanced technology, and then they slowly shifted to become the norm. I would argue that the window moves more quickly these days.

But media always seems to be at the forefront of technology – many technological breakthroughs are media related and have been throughout the history of mankind.

Technology has certainly had an influence – I don’t know whether media has always been pushing technology, or whether it has always been using the latest technology. It certainly has previously utilised it, and the people who have utilised the technology are the ones that have had the upper hand. Look back to Murdoch in the use of technology in the production of newspapers, originally pioneered by the Eddie Shah with Today.

I think people get business advantage by using technology and media. I don’t think necessarily the mainstream media are quick in adopting technologies and making the most of them, and that’s frustrating. However, this gives a space for the people who are outside the mainstream media, micro-production companies if you will, to use the technologies to create and deliver their content to an audience on an economic basis.

Do you think the public thave an active participation in convergence? Do they see the convergence as something they are getting involved in or do they see it as something that has happened around them? Five years ago they were going out and buying DVD players and now they are buying PVRs – Do you think they are seeing it as progress or just something new to buy?

Let’s use digital music, because that’s quite a good example. One of the articles on Digital Lifestyles today covered the Virgin Music Player, a little thing you just hang on your waist.  People will obviously notice that they don’t have to carry around a bulky CD player or a mini disc player or a cassette player, but as to whether they realise that the changes are wider reaching than that – I doubt it. It will feel like another small step.

These days people are now conscious of change. They have come to expect things to change. They are becoming numbed to the “Oh my god” reaction, when they come into contact with a new use of technology.

The people in the industry see it as significant, because they see the long-term impact.
 
One of the ironies I perceive with convergence is that the media itself, those pieces of entertainment like music, film and to some extent e-books, are becoming fragmented through platform and DRM issues. Do you think that we will be happy buying three versions of the same thing in the near future because the DRM or file formats are incompatible, or do you think that this will be resolved gracefully?

Incompatibility is a fear of mine and yes, in the short term, it is likely. It’ll happen because of the number of incompatible content protection systems that are around. I think the industry, whether it be the providers of content protection or the media companies, which are using the content protection systems that don’t allow interchange between devices are going to do themselves a disservice and, if it continues, will frankly end up irritating the customer.

I have asked the question to quite a number of people in the media business and technology business – I have never really had a good answer from them either. How do you sell the public something that’s less good, through it’s restrictions, than the thing that is being replaced? Something that ends up flexible, even though the form it is held in allows greater flexibility? So, short term I think it probably will be a problem. I hope that it won’t be a problem beyond the short term.

It can be argued that a lot of the fragmentation that we are seeing in media in file formats and devices is down to proprietary systems that are involved in the creation of media, and in its protection and distribution so we have DRM, we have CDs which can’t be played on PCs.   These are all proprietary.  Do you think there is a place for open standards in a convergent media culture?

I think the reason this hasn’t happened so far is that the prize is so enormous. The prize for being the provider of content protection is to be one of the largest businesses in the world. Much commercial material will only reside in the rights holders-approved DRM formats; ones that they feel protect their interest. That’s not to say that there won’t be a huge market for other content in another format, and that could be an open format.

Do you think that one company will be allowed to hold the keys for content protection?

Who is going to stop them? Are you talking about Government restrictions?

Some view it as a monopoly.

Certainly from the discussions I have had with content creators of the large studios, there is an unease with a number of companies holding all of the keys. There have been many suggestions as to the way that could be got around. One I found interesting was Fraunhoffer’s Light Weight DRM (LWDRM), but it still relies on a central repository that decides whether you are entitled to this music or that you have paid to have access to it.

The Fraunhoffer response to that question is to say, well we place that with a third party – so you split up the business of running the content protection system away from the business of holding the keys to the access to that content. Their suggestion was that it be done by institutions like the German post office. Different nations have got different relationships with their governments. So that’s something that might work in a country such as Germany, but not others.

There are two arguments – on the open source side there are many people, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for example, who argue that there should be no content protection and people will pay for their content, relying on the good nature of man.
 
Rightly or wrongly, that is not how the mainstream media industry sees it. But if you look at companies like Warp Records, they sell their music in MP3 format. They have taken a more open file format, which can be exchanged quickly between different formats and difference devices. The consumer in me sees this as completely reasonable. I buy something and then I am able to put it on whichever device I want.

I did some research for the European Commission on a unified media platform called N2MC and it became clear from speaking to a wide range of people, along the whole creation-to-distribution change, that the idea of an open source content protection system didn’t currently work for them.

Because it could be easily reversed engineered?

It was seen as a weakness in the chain. One part of a content protection system must remain proprietary.

This interview is continued and concluded here.


Simon is chairing ‘The missing piece – Getting paid for content’ session between 11:30 and 13:00 at the IBC conference on Sunday, 12th September in Amsterdam. Register for IBC here

Survey: US Console and Game Sales Down 2.5%

A survey from NPD indicates that US console hardware and software sales fell 2.5% during the first half of 2004. Price cuts from Sony and Microsoft saw a drop in the market’s value, but the number of units sold was up by 1%.

The console market in the US was worth US$3.4 billion (€2.78 billion) during the first six months of 2004, compared to US$3.5 billion (€2.86 billion) for the same period last year.

All of the consoles available have been on sale for at least two years now, so penetration is high – this caused a 17% drop in hardware sales. Portable software (that’ll be Game Boy cartridges then) fell 12%. However, internet accessories like the PS2’s broadband adaptor rose 120% and “speciality controllers” rose 184%. Looks like everybody decided to go out and buy a Wavebird.

“The reduced price points for Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation 2 helped to stabilize industry sales during the first half of the year,” said Richard Ow, s senior video games analyst at NPD. “While the first quarter of 2004 was showing double-digit losses in console hardware unit sales, with the help of lower price points for the Xbox and PS2 during the second quarter of 2004, the industry actually saw double-digit increases in unit sales for the entire second quarter of the year.”

NPD

Infinium Labs Get $50 Million Credit Investment

Infinium Labs, broadband console manufacturer, has secured a new US$50 million credit line from an institutional investor. Infinium are planning to release their new console in the autumn – but there’s still now clues as to what gamers will actually be playing on it.

Infinium have retained HPC Capital Management to evaluate the company’s current and future capital needs. They, of course are confident in the Phantom’s prospects: “Infinium Labs is at the forefront of the revolution in gaming – the move from consoles and PCs to the streaming of a library of titles over broadband networks into the home, to a receiver that sits in the living room and is used by everyone in the family,” Vince Sbarra, President of HPC Capital Management, said in a statement. “We’ve been watching the number of broadband users increase every year. After carefully evaluating the industry, we feel that Infinium Labs represents a significant opportunity to enter this market with a company that has a solid management team that combines the experience of two worlds – executives from networking businesses and senior managers that have previously launched a successful game system.”

The Phantom is now billed as an always on “games receiver” – though no-one has publicly announced any content for it. Their latest brochure talks up the service: “This fall, the dream of being able to purchase any game, at any time, from the comfort of the family room, becomes a reaility.”

Any game? It’s said that the Infinium will run specially packaged PC games that will run without a complex installation and configuration process. The console itself is free, though the service costs US$30 (€24) a month, with premium games costing $5 (€4) for a three day “rental”. At this stage you’d expect Infinium to be creating demand by mentioning things like “Half Life 2” or “Far Cry” but no titles at all are associated with the console.

With an on sale date less than four months away, Infinium had better get a move on in enthusing the public about their content – people aren’t going to subscribe to a new service just because it comes with a free shiny box.

Infinium Labs

Console Modification Now Illegal in the UK

Bad news for gamers who like to play import titles on their consoles – the UK high court has ruled that it is illegal to sell, advertise or even possess mod chips for commercial purposes. Mod chips are small circuits used to circumvent region locking schemes on consoles, but can also be used to defeat copy protection systems.

The ruling came from a case against David Ball – it was judged that the trader acted unlawfully by selling 1,500 Messiah 2 mod chips, under the new European Union Copyright Directive. The EUCD is seen by some as even more restrictive to consumer rights than the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The case was brought against Mr Ball by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.

Mod chips are used by gamers to play import games – many prized Japanese games do not see a release in the UK, or are months behind. Often a mod chip is the only way that a gamer can have the opportunity to play a title from another market. Animal Crossing is a splendid, released in Japan two years ago, the game is only just getting a European release – and only after campaigns and protests to Nintendo convinced them to release it. Needless to say I myself have been happily playing the game for some months.

“This case, together with the recent successful criminal case against chippers in Belgium, confirms in the clearest possible terms that Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has the right to protect the illegal infringement of our intellectual property rights, and those of third party game developers,” said SCEE president David Reeves. “We are sending a clear message to manufacturers and distributors of mod chips throughout the PAL territories that we will continue to pursue legal action against them.”

Implementations of the EUCD tend to be inconsistent however – Sony recently lost a case in Spain and an Italian court recently ruled that it was up to the console owner what they did with their console, not the manufacturer – and indeed ruled that the chips are essential to preventing monopolies.

SCEE

Welcome to Animal Crossing

PlayStation3: 2006, Playable Demo at E3

Ken Kutaragi has said that Sony plans to have a working PlayStation3 console at next May’s E3 show – so if you’re not doing anything between 18th and 20th of May next year, you might as well get yourself to Los Angeles.

Kutaragi told a meeting of PlayStation developers, suppliers and journalists: “There has been some talk that development is not going well, but we expect to have a playable version at E3. We are pushing ahead with that schedule in mind.”

Sony have been receiving a lot of criticism lately for their PlayStation brand – the PSX has been discontinued in Japan after selling only 100,000 units, and the PSP is under scrutiny with developers citing concerns battery life and screen quality. Sony have yet to confirm what the battery life of its new handheld console will be, and it has emerged that the screen in the demonstration model costs 70,0000 Yen (€520) alone. Clearly Sony will not be able to produce a console with the same screen and will have to source another, cheaper component.

Last week Sony Computer Entertainment announced that they had changed the memory chips in in the PS3 to 256 megabit chips, down from 512. This does not necessarily mean that the console has had its memory capacity halved, doomsayers – it could mean that, with the same memory and twice the number of chips that the bandwidth has been doubled: from 25.6 gigabits to 51.2 gigabits per second.

Sony are expected to follow their usual release pattern with PlayStation hardware – the console may well become available one year after its demonstration at E3, making that May 2006. US release will follow a couple of months later, with a European launch three months or so after that. Expect worried parents queuing up trying to get one of the few models released in the UK for Christmas 2006.

SCEE

Curfews for Gamers in LA

Looks like those teenage Everquest players have been getting out of hand – after a report found that 86% of people arrested in cybercafes were juveniles, the city of Los Angeles has cracked down hard with a curfew.

New city ordinance, to come into effect in two months, bans kids under 18 from the city’s 30 or so cybercafes after 10pm on weekdays – and they won’t be allowed in between 8.30am and 1pm either.

Los Angeles is also looking to regulate the growing cybercafe business, and now requires premises with five PCs or more to have a police license, and video cameras for security.

The new legislation is the result of a review instigated after a brawl in a cybercafe last year. Two groups of kids got out of hand after a particularly energetic bout of Counter Strike. Evidently, the post-match recriminations went a bit further than just typing “omfg i pwned u!!!!! i r0x0r!!!111!” to their victims.

Dennis Zine – the councillor responsible for the law

Square Enix Games on Vodafone Live!

Role-playing game connoisseurs were seen weeping tears of joy today after Vodafone announced that they had teamed up with Square Enix to produce content for Vodafone live!

live!, (the bane of copywriters, editors and just about everyone believes that, in order to be useful, a language should have a consistent grammar that isn’t broken just so that marketing departments can sell things), is a content delivery service for Vodafone customers.

The first up of two titles will be Aleste, a port of the 1990 Master System game from Toppan. Whilst not exactly Ikaruga, it should provide some twitch-gaming fun with some imaginative (well, for the time) bosses and power-ups.

The next is Actraiser, a 1991 SNES RPG with world-building elements and a side-scrolling play dynamic.

Tantalisingly on the horizon is a mobile version of Drakengard, which can be described as Panzer Dragoon meets Dynasty Warriors. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?

The excitement in this deal lies in the future – Square Enix have a back catalogue made up of the very best RPGs in console history, and if they choose the right properties, many thousands of fans will happily hand over cash (or bags of gil) for Final Fantasy yet again, just to play it on another format.

Vodafone live!

Square Enix

SCEA President: Cheaper Broadband is Critical for Future Consoles

Sony Computer Entertainment America’s (SCEA) president, Kaz Hirai has said that broadband, and cheap broadband too, is going to be essential for future of games consoles – and you can bet he’s talking about the PS3.

His presentation to the Congressional Internet Caucus focussed on Sony’s content strategy for their next iteration of the absurdly popular PlayStation console brand. Sony, and indeed most console and games manufacturers, are placing a lot of emphasis on online gaming as it carries a lot of potential for microtransactions – a constant stream of small charges for extra content, access to games and services. The notable exception here is Nintendo, who have done their best to hide the fact that there is a broadband adaptor for the GameCube and will even happily prosecute UK games stores if they dare try to sell one.

To encourage the growth of online gaming, and therefore the microtransaction business model, Hirai argues that broadband subscription fees need to be cheaper.

Hirai emphasised Sony’s commitment to online gaming by saying “For the next generation console, online is going to be like air conditioning in a car. You’re going to need it.”

Kaz Hirai’s presentation

Exclusive: Mobile Gaming Goes 3D

Mobile gaming, that is playing games on your mobile phone, is growing rapidly. Advances in phones, displays and networks mean that the handset in your jacket pocket is a considerably more powerful games console than that NES you sat in front of just a few years ago playing Mario Kart. In fact, phones have grown in sophistication so quickly that it’s quite shocking to think that just five years ago our most immersive mobile gaming experience was a quick bout of Snake.

The success of mobile gaming can attributed to Java – Sun’s environment means that games can be written in Java and will run on any phone that has a J2ME (Java 2, Micro Edition) virtual machine embedded in its operating system.

Additionally, Gamers are now used to seeing graphics made out of millions of polygons on their GameCubes and PlayStation 2s and expect the same thing from their mobile gaming. Memory and processor advances now mean that games developers can now meet this demand, and so the JSR184 standard (now known as M3G) came into being, to provide a platform for developers to produce immersive 3D games.

As phones incorporate more memory, faster processors, dedicated graphics chips, stereo sound and 3D graphics, it means that games too require more resources to produce. As the games get more complex they require a multi-disciplined approach, with artists, coders, level designers and musicians all contributing to the final product.

This rapid increase in sophistication means that it’s now impossible to produce a decent game for modern phones without a suite of development tools, and as 3D graphics creep out onto our phones, tools are appearing that deal specifically with the unique problems of throwing around shaded, textured polygons on tiny screens with limited resources.

A new breed of tools, specifically designed to enable developers to squeeze the best performance out of M3G is appearing, and you’ll be playing games created with these tools on your phone in the very near future.

I had a chat with Stephan Groud from Superscape – one of the companies behind the M3G standard – and product manager for the first 3D toolkit for mobile phones, Swerve. We talked about the benefits of 3D and what’s up next for mobile phone gaming.

Tell me a little how Superscape got into 3D on phones, and how Swerve came into being.

Superscape is 3D company – we’ve done 3D for 18 years now. We’ve always worked in the 3D field, either around 3D games or tools. In short, the company has always been focussed on 3D for low processing power or low bandwidth.

We looked at the mobile market and decided that we had the expertise to take our experience and provide 3D for constrained devices and constrained networks, which is exactly what the mobile market is about.

We set out to develop this technology, Swerve, which is basically suited for 3D on mobile devices. To make it a success, we went to companies like ARM and Vodaphone – and came to the conclusion that unless there was a standard to do 3D on mobile phones, then it wouldn’t be a viable proposition.

We then went to Nokia and Sun and helped set up the JSR 184 standard, which basically states how you do 3D, in Java, on a mobile phone. The exact remit of the standard was to deliver 3D experiences on mobile platforms, over the air. The standard had to be generic enough to do not only games, but menus, user interfaces and potentially location-based services. It also needed to be a standard that could output content small enough to downloaded over the air.

The standard was ratified in November 2003, and since Swerve had been in the making for about three years, it was the first commercial implementation of that standard, both in terms of engine and tools.

What exactly is the Swerve platform?

The Swerve solution is an engine, compliant with JSR 184, that sits on your phone, within the Java architecture. We worked with companies such as Siemens and Motorola to embed our technology in handsets to make them JSR 184 compliant, or M3G compliant which is the new name for the standard. A M3G phone can run any JSR184 piece of content.

On top of releasing the engine on the day the standard was ratified, we announced the second generation of our tools, SwerveStudio. This allows you to export 3D scenes from 3dsMax – we took the most popular 3D package and built in every function that would be required to author or develop content for the M3G platform, without having to recreate everything from scratch. If you know 3dsMax and you have an understanding of the M3G API, you can use SwerveStudio because it’s basically the same thing, but with tools for optimising the scene for mobile phones, to preview the scene as it would look on a handset, to script behaviours, and to export the scene as a M3G file.

If you have SwerveStudio and you have 3dsMax you have an environment that allows you to create a good chunk of what a game is. The rest is done by a coder through a regular Java IDE [integrated development environment].

By integrating your toolkit in 3dsMax and using the Java VM on phones, that gives you a huge installed base of artists and coders that can use Swerve straight away – and a huge installed base of consumers that can run the content.

We’re working with mobile phone manufacturers to get the M3G API embedded onto handsets shipped from this summer onwards.

We’re not the only people to come up with a product based on the M3G standard, and there are other people announcing phones and tools based upon it, so that’s basically growing the market for games that are based on our tools.

What are the main titles coming out that use Swerve?

We realised quickly that it was all well and good to have a tool set, but the manufacturers and operators want games. What we’ve done over the past six to eight months is to create a catalogue of games – and most of those games are based on famous intellectual properties from Sony, Disney and 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Activision. We either developed those games in house or worked with external developers. The games are Independence Day, based on the 20th Cenutry Fox movie; Van Helsing, Universal’s blockbuster this summer; SWAT from Sony Pictures; and Evel Knievel – we have the rights for mobile platforms to develop games based on his brand; we’re working with Disney on TRON2.0, which will be focussed on Light Cycles, so we’re not cramming too much into a game that has to be downloaded over the air.

Big brands, big studios, big companies are all working with us because they’ve had a look at our technology and said “Hey, this is the best way to take our brand into the mobile space.”

M3G as a technology gives a truer representation of your brand. If you look at other technologies, even 2D, it’s sometimes difficult to recognise the brand you’re using.

We’re working with the guys behind the brands and studios to improve our tools, improve the engine and tackling IP holders, game developers, network operators, handset manufacturers and technology guys to make sure the whole system works together.

When will the first Swerve-developed titles be available for download?

That’ll be with the release of the first M3G handsets, in Q3 2004.

What do you think of handsets like the N-Gage QD that use dedicated games on memory cards, and attempt to be more of a games console rather than a phone? Do you think they’re a kind of stopgap, or that this will be a common way for distributing titles?

There are two ways to do mobile 3D games. One way is the N-Gage route, which is basically native games, megabytes of data, you buy a cartridge in a shop and you plug it into your handset. That’s something that has been proven in the past with the GameBoy and GameBoy Advance, there’s clearly a market for it. Whether there is room for a mobile phone player to create a market for it is another question.

The other way is what M3G is exactly about: It’s not native, it’s Java with none of the benefits of native because the engine is partly Java, partly native to keep performance up. It’s sub-250 kilobyte games, to be downloadable over the air, and you don’t have to go into a shop and buy it. You can be on a train or a taxi, you didn’t know you wanted to play a game, but you’ve got fifteen minutes in front of you and no newspaper at hand. You can download a game on impulse.

These are two very different propositions. If you’re talking about platforms like the N-Gage right now, the volumes are fairly limited, because of the price point, because of the market it targets, as opposed to Java handsets – there are going to be millions of those over the coming years. Java handsets are a cheaper proposition and are more accessible. A handset can have the M3G API embedded in it and still look like a professional handset.

We’ve chosen the M3G way because we believe that mobile handsets are inherently connected devices and, in the same way that add-on camera accessories for handsets never took off, potentially the same thing could happen to platforms like the N-Gage. If you have to think about what you’re going to be doing with the phone over the day, you lose the immediate satisfaction of downloading a game on impulse and being able to play it.

What N-Gage has done though, is to put mobile gaming on the map for a lot of people. Nokia is a big company and the fact that they’ve pushed this platform so much and invested so much money in it has raised a few heads around the industry and also around the console industry.

Our proposition is downloadable content and we’re sticking to that right now, because our technology can do it.

What’s next for Swerve?

We’ll be looking at how well customers react to 3D on mobile phones, and looking at the uplift that 3D on phones causes, in the same way that 3D on consoles caused such a big market.

We’ll also be growing the catalogue of games that we have in house, or that we develop with partners. We have about 25 right now – we’re going to need a lot more than that when there are several different handsets in the market.

Also, Swerve as a 3D technology can also run in BREW and native environments, as well as J2ME. Swerve BREW applications can be run on BREW handsets such as the recently announced Kyocera Koi, thanks to a downloadable BREW extension provided by Superscape to BREW network operators. Swerve Native applications can run on the same engine as Swerve J2ME applications as it is a dual language 3D engine. This makes the business case for embedding the engine on an upcoming handset even more attractive, especially as Swerve is a generic 3D engine.

The next challenge will be hardware graphics acceleration, and the M3G standard was built with hardware acceleration in mind. The hardware acceleration does the grunt work in terms of rendering polygons, shading and anti-aliasing and M3G gives the developers a nice API to work with to develop games quickly.

M3G is a high level API, with a scene tree with nodes for each object in the scene – what that means for an animator or a programmer that you move a car or an actor rather than move every single polygon that makes up the car. It’s object based.

M3G has a long life in front of itself, even when hardware acceleration comes along because it gives an entry point for developers and designers that is very easy to use without losing the benefits of hardware acceleration.

What do you think are the most important types of game for mobile phones? Will the connectivity change the types of games people play?

We’re developing a variety of games, single player games. Given the interface on mobile phones, we have racing games, first person shooters, sports games. These are quite well-suited because most handsets today have some form of joystick so it’s quite easy to navigate a car around.

In terms of multiplayer, you have to be concious that networks have latency and so turn-based games are the ideal target for the moment. Golf is a great example of a game that is quite interactive and visual, benefits from being in 3D and at the same time is simple to implement in multiplayer because you can actually play in turns.

I suppose bandwidth is less of an issue with golf because you’re only transmitting a vector?

The interesting thing with golf in 3D is that if you both have the same game and you’re playing with each other you don’t have to send that much data across the network because you’re not replicating that much data: the power of the shot, the swing. The game engine can understand this and replay it like a movie on your opponent’s handset.

There are a lot of tricks with 3D implementations of games, like being able to download new levels, new guns that we’re looking at also.

Do you think there is much of a market for selling add-ons to games like levels, skins and equipment?

If you look at ringtones and wallpapers, well who would have thought that people would be willing to pay millions of dollars to just have a different ringing sound on their phone?

We hope there is a market for game add-ons, and it depends on the way that a campaign is organised. In Formula One, for example a developer could release a game on the first day of the season, with the first track — and subsequently produce new tracks for every race available for download.

This makes a lot of sense because they can charge a little for each new track, but in terms of network usage it’s nothing. The data they need to send to recreate a new 3D track if the game is well built is minimal. The less data they send over the network, the better it is for them economically. The value for the user is extreme, because they have a new track and they can actually play the race that’s being run that weekend.

It’s a whole industry in the making!

3D brings a lot more. If you need to send a 2D track, then you’re in for a big download. You’re looking at sprites as opposed to rearranging pieces of track. You can have green trees in England and yellow trees in Spain, but in 3D it’s the same tree, it’s already on the phone – you’re just saying “this.tree = yellow”, rather than downloading an image of a new tree.

We’re learning every day – it’s exciting times. When you think about convergence, this really gives some meaning to the word: you have people from the PC world, such as developers, hardware and 3D guys, mobile phone operators, cinema studios – everybody is coming together.

It does seem that you need many different skills to produce a game these days – you need proper artists, programmers, musicians, you need to get the intellectual property from somewhere…

It’s not easy, but the results are quite impressive!

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