Multiplatform Development

Benjamin NitschkeCTO Delta Engine &exDream & MobileBits

Benjamin@DeltaEngine.net

MobileBits GmbH

Lerchenstrasse 28

22767 Hamburg

exDream GmbH

Hildesheimer Str. 35

30169 Hannover

MobileBits GmbH

Overview

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• Who is MobileBits?

• Why Multiplatform?

• Market Analysis

• Engine Comparison

• Mobile Development is challenging

• Example Game on iPhone, Android, WP7

• Our Solution: The Delta Engine

Who is MobileBits?

2

• Founded 2009 by Holtz, Griga, Nitschke & Wysk

• Focus on Mobile Games

• Developed many smaller Mobile Games

• iSkat, ZombieParty, FlightSchool, Ewe Doodle, ..

• Also is developing www.DeltaEngine.net

• Allows developing games and apps in Windows

• Deploys with one click on many platforms:

• iPhone, iPad, Android, WP7, Xbox 360, Windows,

MacOS, Linux, and many more

Who is MobileBits?

3

• Same team as exDream, known 10+ years for:• Twork (1997), WebWars (2000)• Rosho: Games for Kids (2001)• EuroVernichter (.NET, 2003)• Arena Wars (RTS, first commercial .NET game, 2004)• Armies of Steel (Prototype, RTS, 2005)• Rocket Commander (Open Source, 2005)• XNA Racing Game (Xbox 360, first XNA game, 2006)• Arena Wars Reloaded (RTS, 2007)• Fireburst (PC, Xbox 360, PS3, UE3, 2009/2011)• ZombieParty (iPad Party Game, 2010)• SoulCraft (iPhone, Android, WP7, 2011)• Many smaller iPhone Games and other projects …

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4

Why Multiplatform?

10

• Past: Start with Single Platform Game Development

• Recent: Multiplatform Shift on Consoles, Web, iOS

• Present: One platform or all platforms

• Most teams still focus on one platform

• Successful games are often rewritten on other

platforms, but only exceptional games

• Or you need an engine to be on many platforms:

• Unreal Engine 3 (Consoles)

• Unity (mostly iPhone)

• More examples later

Why Multiplatform?

10

• A game programmers life was hard in the past (1980)

• Writing programs in low level languages

• Hardware was slow as hell

• Good performance was only possible in a very low

level and it is heavily hardware dependant

• Usually no good tools around

• Everyone build their own engine, tools and libraries

• Software was simplistic (because of all this)

• Consoles and Handheld devices were not different,

programmed on a very low level by very few

Why Multiplatform?

10

Commodore 64Commodore 64

Why Multiplatform?

10Prince of Persia (1989, first released on Apple II, then DOS, Amiga, Atari, etc.)Prince of Persia (1989, first released on Apple II, then DOS, Amiga, Atari, etc.)

Why Multiplatform?

10

• Windows dominated App-Development in the 90th

• Games getting more complex (RTS, Shooters)

• Libraries and better tools emerge

• DOS: Still very direct, most games still have to

write their own drivers, VGA games mostly

• Windows: Getting very popular for game

programmers due DirectX, also OpenGL and

many emerging tools, libraries and frameworks

• Visual Studio still today the de facto standard

• There is also Consoles, but only few develop for them

Why Multiplatform?

10Doom (1993 on DOS, later ported to many platforms, including Linux, Mac OS, Amiga, Xbox, iPhone, etc.)Doom (1993 on DOS, later ported to many platforms, including Linux, Mac OS, Amiga, Xbox, iPhone, etc.)

Why Multiplatform?

10Fury3 (1996, on of the first DirectX Windows games), based on a popular DOS game Terminal VelocityFury3 (1996, on of the first DirectX Windows games), based on a popular DOS game Terminal Velocity

Why Multiplatform?

10

• 2000-2010: Development still dominated by Windows

• Consoles are getting more popular (Xbox, Xbox

360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii, etc.)

• Games are also getting much more popular

• Complexity goes crazy, teams grow in the hundreds

• Lots of frameworks, libraries, tools and engines

• Quake3 engine dominated early in 20th

• Halflife game and engine also very successful

• Unreal3 dominated late in 20th

• Many other engines and frameworks

Why Multiplatform?

10

2004 many great PC games came out that were the foundation for many nowadays popular game engines:

Halflife: Counter-Strike, Halflife1, Halflife 2, Left4Dead, Portal, Team Fortress, Garry's Mod, etc.Farcry: Farcry, Farcry 2, Crysis, Crysis 2Doom & Quake: Many games in 1998-2004 used the Quake3 engine, not so many since thenUnreal3 Engine: Unreal 2 was used a bit, but Unreal 3 a lot: Is currently the most successful PC and Console engineBTW: Unity3D was also started in 2001 and became usable around this time (2005) ^^

2004 many great PC games came out that were the foundation for many nowadays popular game engines:

Halflife: Counter-Strike, Halflife1, Halflife 2, Left4Dead, Portal, Team Fortress, Garry's Mod, etc.Farcry: Farcry, Farcry 2, Crysis, Crysis 2Doom & Quake: Many games in 1998-2004 used the Quake3 engine, not so many since thenUnreal3 Engine: Unreal 2 was used a bit, but Unreal 3 a lot: Is currently the most successful PC and Console engineBTW: Unity3D was also started in 2001 and became usable around this time (2005) ^^

Why Multiplatform?

10

• Most of the time small teams could focus on one platform

• In the 80th you could focus on C64 or Amiga

• In 1990 as a game developer DOS was most used

• 1995 Windows 95 and DirectX was a good choice

• 2000 Windows was a good choice for most teams

• 2005/2006 Many consoles came out, many developers

would focus on one platform

• 2007/2008 iPhone came out, many focused on just iOS

development and many simple apps were extremely

successful in 2008 with Apples AppStore

Why Multiplatform?

10

Angry Birds (2009, one of many very successful iPhone games, was ported to many other platforms later)Angry Birds (2009, one of many very successful iPhone games, was ported to many other platforms later)

Why Multiplatform?

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• By now you should have noticed a trend:

• All those games were only developed for one platform

• If your game is successful, it will be ported later

• Not all games are this successful and have this luxury

to make port later if the initial version is already selling

• There are also Multiplatform-Games from the start

• Those are mostly sequels or done by big teams

• This trend is changing a bit as many software giants

provide multiple platforms: Apple with iOS (iPhone, iPad),

Microsoft with XNA (Xbox 360, Windows, WP7)

Market Analysis

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Market Analysis

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1 bn USD (2009)

10 bn USD (2015)

Why not just develop iPhone Games?• Mobile game market is shifting towards Android and WP7• And growing on all platforms and devices (e.g. tablets this year)

Most apps are games (iPhone, Android,WP7), but usually costs only 99 cents.Sell many apps on many platforms!

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2010 Developer Distribution 2015 Developer Distribution

ca. 80%

development

under

Windows

Most

developers

will still work

in Windows

or use tools

or engines

AppStore(iOS, Android,..)

Consoles

PC

Consoles

PC

AppStore

> 2 * AppStore

developers needed

Market Analysis

Market Analysis

12

Mobile Platforms are a pretty good target platform for games:

The popularity of mobile games has increased in the 2000s, as over $3 billion USD worth of games were sold in 2007 internationally, and projected annual growth of over 40%.

Ownership of a smartphone alone increases the likelihood that a consumer will play mobile games. Over 90% of smartphone users play a mobile game at least once a week.

In recent years, there has been a move towards mobile games which are distributed free to the end user, but carry prominent, paid advertising.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_game

Engine Comparison

13

• These days lots of Multiplatform Engines are available:

• Unreal3 (Consoles, PC)

• CryEngine (High Performance PCs)

• Unity3D (Mobile, Mac, Web)

• Torque (popular before Unity for Indies)

• Many other possibilities:

• Vision Engine

• Irrlicht

• Ogre

• Many proprietary and closed engines, etc.

Engine Comparison

13

• Most other engines are either:

• Black boxes (Unity, UDK, Editors, Modding)

• Just graphic frameworks for specific platforms

(DirectX, XNA, OpenGL ES)

• Or huge native code engines with high license costs

(only suitable for big teams: Unreal, CryEngine, etc)

• We like .NET, it allows more rapid development!

• Only recently possible on all platforms

• Xbox 360, WP7, Windows -> Microsoft

• iPhone, Android, Linux, Mac -> Novell

Engine Comparison

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• Most platforms have specific frameworks and usually only

support 1-2 languages well:

• iPhone: Objective-C (not very pretty)

• Android: Java (lots of config files, can compile C too)

• Windows Phone 7: Only C# (Silverlight or XNA)

• Xbox 360: Native C++ (XDK, or C# with XNA, Xbla)

• PS3, Wii: C++ (have their own frameworks, ES)

• Linux: Mostly C++ (gcc), Java, also .NET (Mono)

• MacOS: Objective C and C++ mostly

• Windows can do everything (.NET, Java, Scripts, …)

Engine Comparison

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• Unreal 3 Engine/UDK

• Targeted to big teams

• Heavily focused on Editor

• Lots of tools and support for Artists

• Unreal Script

• With a license can be programmed

natively (C++, Huge Code base)

• Expensive, Complex, 15+ Years Old

• PC, Xbox 360, PS3

• Recently iOS and Android too

Engine Comparison

14

• CryEngine 1 was FarCry (2004)

• CryEngine 2 was Crysis (2007) and used

in a few other games

• CryEngine 3 is used in Crysis 2 (2011)

• Focus on great visuals, shader heavy

• Cool sandbox features

• Struggling with low performance PCs

• With a license can be programmed

natively (C++, Huge Code base, Lua)

• Expensive, Complex

Engine Comparison

14

• Unity3D

• Mac oriented engine

• Editor based

• Scripting: C#, JS, Boo

• No source code access

• Huge community

• Focused on small teams and individuals

• Became very successful in the last few years

• Huge community

• Mac, Web, iOS, Wii, recently added Android

Mobile Development

14

Mobile Development is challenging (10 quick examples)

Mobile Development

14

Mobile Development is challenging (1/10)

You need a lot of actual devices to test

Mobile Development

14

Mobile Development is challenging (2/10)

Different Programming Languages, Different Challenges

Mobile Development

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Mobile Development is challenging (3/10)

• Different Frameworks, Libraries, Engines

• Often you will end up writing your own libraries

• DirectX vs OpenGL

• Physic Engines, which one is for you

• Multimedia formats

• Objective-C library not useful to a Java developer

and vise versa

Mobile Development

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Mobile Development is challenging (4/10)

• Write game natively or use a engine?

• Early when a new platform comes out most games

are written without engines

• As games get more complex more and more

libraries are needed

• Many engines to choose from, each one has

advantages and disadvantages:

• Unity3D, Unreal3, Vision, Torque (GarageGames),

XNA, Vision Engine, Delta Engine, etc.

Mobile Development

14

Mobile Development is challenging (5/10)

Different device capabilities = Different file formats

Mobile Development

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Mobile Development is challenging (6/10)

• Many devices have different resolutions

• iPhone 2G, 3G, 3GS: 480x320

• iPad: 1024x768

• iPhone 4: 960x640

• Android: 320x240, 480x320, 640x320, 800x480,

864x480, 1024x600, 1280x720, and many more

• WP7: 800x480

• PC, Xbox 360, PS3: 720p, 1080p, many more

• Aspect ratio can be 3:2, 16:9, 16:10, 5:4, 17:10, etc.

Mobile Development

14

Mobile Development is challenging (7/10)

• How to get big content on small devices?

• Xbox 360, PS3 is challenging with 256 MB Ram

• iOS can have as little as 15MB left to work with

• Even newer devices might only have 50-100MB of

memory free to use.

• Mobile devices are not build for multitasking

• There is no swapping memory

• Compression is key, keep content small

• Swap out loaded content yourself (streaming, etc.)

Mobile Development

14

Mobile Development is challenging (8/10)

• Often existing games need to be

ported

• Web games run too slow, a

native port is better

• PC and Console games need

a lot of rethinking

• Handling input is challenging,

devices were not really build

for gaming

Mobile Development

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Mobile Development is challenging (9/10)

• Compiling game source code

and/or content can be very

time consuming

• Deploying also needs time,

testing is crucial, but if your

build takes long times you

have less time developing

• Some tools are horrbily slow

(PVR texture compression)

Mobile Development

14

Mobile Development is challenging (10/10)

• Optimizing complex games is very important

• Simple games can get away with messy code

• Complex games MUST NOT leak memory or they

become unmanageable and unplayable after a while

• GPU is usually very slow (few instructions per pixel)

• CPU is even worse, you can‘t really compare it to a

desktop PC. Even multiple cores does not help you if

your game code is slow.

• Try to separate parts (physics, multimedia, logic, gfx)

Example Game

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• Blocks Game (in just 40 lines of code)

• Written as a sample game for an article

Example Game

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• WP7 Version is about 200 lines of code

Example Game

14

• Android Java Example code from a different game

Example Game

14

• Objective-C is even more complex and verbose

• Even drawing a simple box with OpenGL ES is many

hundred lines of code

Example Game

14

• We as game developers tried out both options

• Using game engines was good and easy in the

beginning, but very challenging later when extending

• Writing games natively was hard in the beginning, but

more extensible later

• Major problem was always maintainance and tools

• Started in 2009 with the Delta Engine to solve this

• Delta Engine is a multiplatform engine in .NET

• Idea was to port and deploy games with a single

mouse click

Delta Engine

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• The blocks game is just 40 lines of code with the Delta

Engine (no tools or features used), with comments 60 lines

• Runs on all supported platforms (PC, Linux, MacOS,

Consoles: Xbox 360, Mobile Devices: iPhone, iPad,

Android, Tablets, WP7, more in the future)

• Uses C# code, very similar to XNA

• Resolution independant

• 1s compile time on Windows and for emulators, few

seconds to minutes for a full deploy on other platforms

• Automatically optimized and reduced for you

Delta Engine

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Full source code with comments for the example game: Blocks

C++ vs C# (setup graphics)

13

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Unity Editor

Game Code

Game Assets

Unity Engine Modules & Features (not customizable)

Unity3D: Closed Model Delta Engine: Open Model

Delta Engine Framework

Game Code Game Assets

Delta Engine

Modules

Third Party Engine Modules

Custom Modules

Black Boxes (Closed) Customizable (Open)

Open Source vs Proprietary

Extremely Open Engine

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• Source code available for free (starting July 2011)

• Develop and publish your games on Windows

• No costs for you!

• If you want to deploy on any other platform than Windows:

• You need a Delta Engine Multiplatform license

• Access to easy to use tools (Launcher, Simulators)

• Which will be cheap or royalty based, no worries

• One click deploy, fast and easy with the Launcher

Launcher Addin for VS

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e.g. Start Unit Tests

• Directly integrated into Visual

Studio 2010

• Also available as Standalone

App for Testers

• Starts programs, games, tests,

tutorials, samples on all

supported devices

• Also shows lots of information

about your project (Tests,

Assemblies, Todo-List, etc.)

Content, Content, Content

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• Today's games are mostly content driven

• Especially on Consoles and PC

• You usually have a powerful engine ready to go

• Sharing content between games was almost impossible in

the past, formats changed too often

• The Delta Engine makes all content always available and

will always work on all supported platforms

Content, Content, Content

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• Example with XNA on Windows Phone 7

• Artist saves .png image file or 3D Model

• Content pipeline converts all files to .xnb

• .xnb is the only format allowed for WP7

• Images are best stored as DDS files

• XNA’s content pipeline does the

conversion for you

• 3D Models or Levels often need custom

importers because of different needs

Content, Content, Content

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Step 1: Add Content file to Content Project

Step 2: Load and use content in code

Content, Content, Content

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• Many content files depend on each other usually

• With the Delta Engine it works very similar and on all

platforms, content is just not needed at compile time!

• Things get more complex if you add more platforms

Content, Content, Content

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• When testing on Windows needs 1-2 files per content

• Makes no sense to keep all formats for all platforms.

• Converting formats takes time. For example a single

2048x2048 iPhone PVR Texture takes 30-40 seconds to

save on really fast PC with 3.6Ghz (we got hundreds)

• So content is only converted when you actually need it

and it has been changed (cache)

• Content is processed on Servers in the Cloud (currently

one server can handle everything, but this will be

expanded as more demand is needed)

Content, Content, Content

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• Content is always automatically requested and build, there

is no button to do it and a human will make too many

mistakes choosing options anyway.

• Instead the build server decides all this and makes sure all

content files work together, optimized as much as possible

• Unused content is removed, Atlas textures are

generated, content is optimized by the shaders used

• Crazy compression rates of 100:1 and more, which is really

required for mobile games (ZombieHockey 2.8MB on WP7,

6 MB iPhone, PC version is 40MB, uncompressed >120MB)

Content, Content, Content

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Example Atlas Textures (generated automatically, 2D & 3D)

• Developed to create games for all AppStore platforms at once

• High quality 3D RPG game SoulCraft to demonstrate the capabilities and speed

• MobileBits cooperates with companies like NVIDIA, EA, Chillingo, Microsoft, Bigpoint and more

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What is the Delta Engine?

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What is the Delta Engine?Develop with .NET for all AppStore platforms No need to learn different and dated languages for different platforms such as iPhone, Android and WP7

Easy to learn and to buildUse your favorite Windows-tools, check out our examples and just press the magic button to build for other platforms

Lightweight and fastWe did the hard work to optimize performance for all platforms - just include the parts you need for your game

Teamwork made easyWith our advanced content management system, editors for game designers and full support of all your favorite tools

Assets and code are Open SourceThe Delta Engine and our example games are Open Source and you are invited to participate or to integrate other libraries

Early version of the Soulcraft Tech Demo in January 2011 at the CES in Las Vegas with NVidia

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ZombieParty runs already on many Platforms

9

October 2010

Delta Engine Release

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Questions? I hope you liked the presentation and the Engine.

Delta Engine Release

July 2011 (v0.9)

v1.0 coming end 2011

www.DeltaEngine.net

Already working on Windows, MacOS, Linux, iPhone, iPad,

Windows Phone 7, Android, Android Tablets, Nvidia Tegra,

Xbox 360 and more soon

Multiplatform Development

Benjamin NitschkeCTO Delta Engine &exDream & MobileBits

Benjamin@DeltaEngine.net

MobileBits GmbH

Lerchenstrasse 28

22767 Hamburg

exDream GmbH

Hildesheimer Str. 35

30169 Hannover

MobileBits GmbH