Wiley.Games.on.Symbian.OS.A.Handbook.for.Mobile.Development.Apr.2008 (779888), страница 4
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As a game programmer, Sam both codes original titles on MIDPand ports games from MIDP to DoJa. In his spare time he also runs theMobile Developer Lab mobile programming site, and is completing anMBA from Charles Sturt University.Outside of work, Sam enjoys working out at the gym and attemptingto read manga in Japanese.Nigel HietalaNigel Hietala is a User Interface Specialist working for Nokia on the S60platform. He has worked for over a decade with mobile devices andalways at companies using Symbian OS. He caught the programming bugwhile originally building UI prototypes of future designs with Flash MXand, much to the dismay of his designer colleagues, has been delvingever deeper into the world of Flash and software development.He still loves computer games and imagines a time when his fourchildren have grown up enough that he can play them again.Editor’s AcknowledgementsThis book wouldn’t have come into being without a great team to writeit.
We somehow managed to coordinate working in multiple time zonesand countries (Australia, Canada, Finland, the UK and the US), and I’dlike to thank Twm, Aleks, Michael, Leon, Paul, Fadi, Sam, Peter, Rolandand Nigel for putting in countless hours on their contributions. We’re allgrateful to our families for their patience and understanding while wetook time out to write this book.We would all like to thank our reviewers for their efforts too, sometimeshelping out at very short notice, and always providing insightful commentsand showing great attention to detail.
We’d particularly like to thank SamCartwright, not only for his review of the chapter about games in Japan,but also for volunteering to go to the 2007 Tokyo Game Show on ourbehalf, and writing a section about it.We’d also like to thank our other contributors and collaborators,including David MacQueen of Screen Digest, Adam Taylor and TimCloss of Ideaworks3D, Krystal Sammis, Jan Bonnevier, Jesus Ruiz andCarlos Hernadez-Fisher of N-Gage, and John Holloway of ZingMagic.Many other people took the time to talk to us about this project; thank youfor your help – Erik, Steve, Phil, Simon, Neil, Bill and Tony at Symbian;Jonathan, Jeff, Van, Kevin and AaPee at Nokia. Thanks also to AnnabelCooke at Symbian for supplying some of the diagrams used in Chapter 1.When the writing stops, the editing starts, and we owe a big ‘thankyou’ to Lisa Voisin for her attention to detail and her serenity in the stormof our copy edit schedule.
(Thanks must also go to Tierney at Nokia forpersuading Lisa to work with us). We’d particularly like to acknowledgethe hard work put in by the Symbian Press team: the ever-patient SatuMcNabb and ever-calm Freddie Gjertsen. Thanks also to Mark ShackmanxxivEDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSand Rodney DeGale for their assistance with all things related to theSymbian Developer Network website.Many thanks to Shena Deuchars for proofreading this book and toTerry Halliday for creating the index.
Finally, a big ‘thank you’ to ourcounterparts at Wiley, particularly Rosie Kemp, Drew Kennerly, ColleenGoldring, Sally Tickner and Hannah Clement, for keeping us on track.May our page count estimates always be accurate. . .Part OneA Symbian Perspectiveon Mobile Games1IntroductionJo Stichbury1.1 Why Games?Electronic games, or video games as they are sometimes known, are bigbusiness.
The sales of games for PCs, consoles, portable game players andmobile phones are now competing with the film industry for consumerspending on entertainment per year. In September 2007, Microsoft’sHalo 3 became the fastest-selling computer game, generating global salesof $300 million worldwide in the first week it was released. The gamewas released for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console on September 25, and itgenerated global sales of more than $170 million in its first 24 hours.1Let’s compare the sales of games with movie tickets. In 2006, theUS box office reported total sales to be $9.49 billion.2 Over the sameperiod, again in the US alone, the NPD Group reports game sales(portable, console and PC games) to be $7.4 billion (and sales of allgames plus portable and console hardware, software and accessories, tohave generated revenues of close to $13.5 billion).3 And it’s not just NorthAmerica; in Japan, average monthly leisure spending was estimated tobe 7300 yen on mobile phone fees, 3700 yen on an Internet connection,2300 yen on electronic games, 2200 yen for books and other print media,1600 yen for music, 1300 yen on karaoke and just under 1000 yen onmovies.4There is crossover and symbiosis between the industries.
A goodexample comes from the animated motion picture Cars, made jointly by1www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/oct07/10-04Halo3FirstWeekPR.mspxmpaa.org/researchStatistics.asp3www.npd.com4The Business and Culture of Digital Games: Gamework and Gameplay, Aphra Kerr,Sage Publications Ltd, 200622INTRODUCTIONDisney and Pixar (now a subsidiary of Disney).
The film made sales of$244.1 million in the US, the second highest figure of any movie releasedin 2006. A video game based on Cars, published by THQ, achieved thesecond highest console title sales in the US in 2006, and shipped morethan seven million units.Given the size of the revenue earned, it’s interesting to think that thegame industry is still quite immature compared to the film industry. Thereare some arguments over what counts as the first computer game evercreated, but it’s commonly held that the first digital video game datesback to 1961. Spacewar was written by Steve Russell at MassachusettsInstitute of Technology, and ran on an early DEC minicomputer, whichwas not really intended for playing games! The first popular home consolesystem was the Atari 2600, released in 1977.That the game industry has caught up with the movie industry in sucha short amount of time probably reflects the growing consumer trendfor interactive entertainment.
It is no longer sufficient simply to consumeentertainment; people want to join in too. Games are a perfect medium todo this; they provide solo and multiplayer interaction over short periodsof time, or for more prolonged sessions that can be returned to, as an‘alternative reality.’Games are everywhere. They are played for entertainment on gameconsoles in the living room, or on handheld systems and mobile phoneson the move. Games are used in schools or in the workplace as aneducational or training aid. They can be played for a short duration, topass time, or for hours at a time, as a player developers a character andskills in a long term role-playing or adventure game.
Games are fun, butthe game industry is a serious billion-dollar business.1.2 What Is Symbian? What Is Symbian OS?Symbian is a British company, formed in 1998 as a collaboration betweenNokia, Ericsson, Motorola and Psion. The company supplies SymbianOS, which is the leading open operating system found in advanced dataenabled mobile phones, known as smartphones. At the time of writingthis book, Symbian OS has been used in over 120 different models ofsmartphone.Symbian does not make smartphones itself, but licenses Symbian OS tothe world’s major handset manufacturers (in alphabetical order, Fujitsu,LG Electronics, Mitsubishi Electric, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sharp andSony Ericsson).Symbian OS is found in the majority of smartphones available. Gartnerestimated Symbian’s market share as 70 % in 2006, while Canalys put itslightly higher, at 71.7 % globally for the same period and, in a separatereport, at 72 % in 2007.
Regional figures for the smartphone market sharein China were reported at 61 % for Q2, 2007, also by Canalys, and atWHAT IS SYMBIAN? WHAT IS SYMBIAN OS?Figure 1.13Representing Symbian OS using a layered model72 % in Japan (where 20 million 3G Symbian smartphones have soldsince 2003).5Symbian OS is a modular operating system, which means that it isconstructed from well-defined, discrete parts, which combine to allow forconfigurability across a range of target hardware.
At a high level, SymbianOS can be thought of as a layered model, as shown in Figure 1.1, withhardware layers at the bottom and support for user-level applications atthe top. From the bottom up, it comprises the following:• kernel services and hardware interface layer• base services such as file server, database and utilities libraries• services for communication, graphics, multimedia, connectivity andstandards support• application services for personal information management (PIM), networking, messaging and application-level Internet protocols and otherstandards support• user interface (UI) framework layer.Symbian OS has a flexible architecture that allows different userinterface layers to run as platforms on top of the core operating system.5Figures were taken from Symbian’s first and second quarter results for the year 2007,posted on their website at www.symbian.com/about/fastfacts/fastfacts.html4INTRODUCTIONThe Symbian OS UI framework just supplies the common core thatenables custom UIs to be developed on top of the operating system.Symbian OS does not include a UI per se – it supplies the ability for oneto be customized on top of it.
The generic UI framework of Symbian OSsupplies the common behavior of the UI: a windowing model, commoncontrols and support for extension by the custom UI, which defines itsown look and feel.The custom UI platforms available for Symbian OS are, in alphabeticalorder:• NTT DoCoMo’s MOAP user interface for the FOMA 3G network(see www.nttdocomo.com) found in Japan• Nokia’s S60, which was formerly known as Series 60 (see www.s60.com)• UIQ, designed by UIQ Technology (see www.uiq.com).Symbian OS development environments range from the Symbian OSCustomisation Kit (CustKit) which is provided by Symbian to handset manufacturers for them to create phone products, to SDKs which are providedby the UI platform vendors to application developers, and are used to create third party software for users to install. The latter can be obtained free ofcharge from the links found at developer.symbian.com/main/tools/sdks.1.2.1 What Is a Smartphone?Having briefly described Symbian, the company, and Symbian OS, theheart of a smartphone, let’s talk more about what a Symbian smartphoneactually is.
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