Day 2 DroidconUK London

My personal Best Of day 2 at DroidconUK 2011.


Android Gaming
CodeSurgeon: Mustafa Isik

Day 1 Droidcon UK in London

HeavenHell @DroidconUK in London preview made by Nelphy (Diotasoft)


I had the honor to see some sequences of the new HeavenHell game made by Nelphy Games (Faceboook, Twitter). The game is realized using Unity3D and will be available on Android and iOS.

Smooth, responsive and user-friendly UIs: Greendroid prime

Talk by Cyril Mottier, the developer of Greendroid, a popular Android opensource library on github that implements improved user interfaces, like ActionBar, impressive variety ListView examples and a lot more. He talked about principles to optimize and turbo charge your application. Pronciples he follows while developing Greendroid. Here are some essential points (not complete!)

• Responsiveness, give visual feedback to user action as fast as possible
• User-friendliness, task-oriented vs feature-oriented
• Respect the Android UI-Thread, do computation intense stuff in separate parallel threads (AsynchTask)
• priorize, stop loading/computing when important animal running, reduce of priority of thread/process

Somehow new to me was the fact that you should consider to use services instead of asynctask. Since AsyncTask restarts when the device orientation changes (reload layout). One example could be an image gallery, that loads its content from a webservice in a background thread. Its not improbable that the user switches often in between Landscape and Portrait mode, when watching a single image.

I hereby clarify that Greendroid supports also honeycomb tablet devices! There is only a naming issue concerning the ActionBar method, which will be fixed soon. I tweeted that there is incombatibility, which is not correct!

Surprise surprise! Blackberry goes Android. I heard it before, but RIM indeed had a booth at Droidcon. Unfortunately there were no devices available for developers to test their apps on RIM products.








Papayamobil Talk

The main news (for me!!) at the Papayamobil talk was that there users that indeed spent insane amount of money for Game items. Apparently one single user spent 2400$ on items though in-App purchase. So make sure your game will integrate this feature. Papayamobile games make most money though the in-app payement. There will be Papayamobil iOS support in the near future.


OpenGLES2 & Android QEMU Emulator

Two developers from Accenture presented their work on a Emulator for Android that supports OpenGL ES 2.0 specification. This is quite important work, since up to today, developers without OpenGL ES 2.0 capable phones can't pretty much test their code during development. OpenGL ES 2.0 is the standard implementation for 3D rendering on mobile devices on Android as well as on the IPhone/IPad.

The project is available for download on github. 

HTC Evo 3D

HTC presented its new powerhorse, the HTC Evo 3D. It comes with an auto-stereoscopic screen that allows you to see objects in 3D stereo without the need of special glasses. This technology exists already for a while, but never took of with standard displays for different reasons. This technology was and is still relatively expensive, there is not enough content available and the quality was not sufficiently good.

Apparently, HTC along with LG (Optimus 3D) has faith in this technology, despite these concerns. The new Evo 3D comes with an impressive 950x540 pixel screen resolution. When using stereo, you got only half the horizontal resolution. there is a button that allows to simply switch between 2d and 3d, which is great. The quality of the 3D stereo display is pretty good. Better than the LG, though thats not surprising, since the screen resolution is higher.

HTC makes a big case about this technology and promoted intensively at DroidconUK. They know they need content to make it a win. But whats the potential content for 3D stereo displays. HTC mentioned movies, games and data visualization. But, in my point of the thing that will make 3D stereo on phones a success will be great 3D games!! I'm entirely convinced. Playing the demo games coming with phone show some good potential and I belief that the creativity of game developers, especially mobile game developers, can give this technology a big boost.

Not to imagine how it could serve for augmented reality.

Some specs of the HTC Evo 3D

• Screen Size: 4.3"
• Resolution: 960x540
• Playback: 720p
• Weight: 6oz
• Processor: 1.2GHz Snapdragon 8660
• Memory: 4GB internal - up to 32GB expandable
• OS: Android 2.3
• Cameras: Dual Rear 5MP, Single Front 1.3MP

Droidcon UK in London Intro

Hi there,

I'am at Droidcon UK in London. Two days of talks all around Android. There are a lot of interesting talks about Business, Design, Games and Development. There are even two talks particularly about Augmented Reality, which I will surely attend. Unfortunately I did not hear anything about a talk related to Unity3D, but it just starts and are two days of presentations to go.

I will write about the talks I liked the most in this blog in the upcoming days.

Stay tuned!