01 August 2008

3D Accelerated Games
Coming Soon To N-Gage Platform!

To the present date, N-Gage game developers had been limited by Nokia in their ability to develop 3D-accelerated games, in an attempt to maintain compatibility across all the range of N-Gage supported phones, which includes largely dissimilar devices. But this seems bound to change.

As some of you may know, some weeks ago, Nokia started a site (http://ngage.uservoice.com), through which, users of the N-Gage service could make themselves heard by making suggestions or supporting other members'.

It happens that as soon as it opened, the request for 3D acceleration support in games became an instant hit, reaching over one thousand support points, while most other suggestions didn't usually go over say three thousand at the time.

Time went by and the majority of N-Gage users continued to show their support for this feature, until last week, an announcement was made by an official spokesperson in the site, that the suggestion had been accepted and 3D acceleration support, including OpenGL ES 1.1, would be included in the next version of the N-Gage SDK.

Although there will be some learning to do, the inclusion of 3D hardware acceleration into the next version of the N-Gage Software Development Kit (SDK) provides developers a reduction in the time and effort required to develop 3D games for the S60 platform.

This should mean that in a not-so-far future, we should be getting a breakthrough in graphics quality, by games making use of the full potential of phones powered by Texas Instruments' 3D-accelerated OMAP 2420 chipset (i.e. N93, N93i, N95, N958Gb and N82), and Nokia devices freaturing any future OpenGL ES compliant hardware.

Few sample screenshots generated with OMAP 2420
(*Click to enlarge )

There has been no announcement as to how these differentiated requirements will be delivered to the N-Gage site.

I made myself a suggestion on that thread, that Nokia created a new 'N-Gage Premium' category, for 3D-accelerated games and devices, but we'll have to wait and see how it comes through.

In the meantime, in expectation, you may want to check out the videos for the preliminary version of "System Rush Evolution" and the 3D accelerated versions of Quake and Quake II.