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Sony Ericsson details Xperia Play development: buttons easy, touchpad just a little trickier
In a post on Sony Ericsson's Developer Blog coinciding with the official launch of the Xperia Play at MWC earlier this month, the company clued in developers on how to take advantage of the game-specific controls they'll be dealing with on that glorious slide-out board. In short, it's insanely straightforward for the most part: the hard buttons just generate standard key codes, which explains why existing games worked so well with the unit we'd previewed. The only tricky part comes into play with the center-mounted touchpad, which can't be accessed through the standard Android SDK -- for that, you'll need to turn over to the NDK, the native-code escape hatch that Android devs use when they need higher performance and want to get closer to the hardware. SE's published a 16-page guide on getting to the touchpad through the NDK, and it seems straightforward enough -- and plenty of game developers are well acquainted with the NDK already, anyway -- so we're guessing it won't be much of a hurdle. Getting devs to support an input method that's only available initially on a single commercial device might be a bigger hurdle... but we digress.
Android NDK hits Release 3, brings OpenGL ES 2.0 access to devs
We know from a brief spat of iPhone 3GS controversy that OpenGL ES 2.0 brings a new level of immersive realism to 3D gaming on mobile devices, so Android developers (and users, for that matter) should be delighted to hear that a new release of the official Native Development Kit exposes its capabilities to anyone targeting Android 2.0 or higher. As a refresher, the so-called NDK is a bolt-on to the standard Android SDK that gives folks the ability to write and compile critical pieces of functionality in native code, closer to the processor without that pesky Java virtual machine standing in the way -- in other words, it's exactly what gamers and game devs need to make Android a serious gaming platform, and better access to badass 3D capabilities are a fun little piece of the puzzle. The latest NDK's available for download now -- so seriously, hurry up and go wow us with your revolutionary first-person shooter. Git!
HyperDevbox ExZeus Arcade allays fears that Android games are destined to suck
For whatever reason, Android's high-performance Native Development Kit introduced back in the Cupcake days never got a ton of attention despite the subtle hints that it'd give devs the low-level access they needed to create killer, graphically rich, immersive environments ready to compete with pretty much any other gaming device you could shove in your pocket. Of course, at the time, every phone in the market was running an older, slower ARM11 core -- so maybe the new generation of ARMv7-based devices we've got hanging around now like the Nexus One and Droid are the catalysts we need to get this party started in earnest. Japan's HyperDevbox studio has just shared the news that its ExZeus Arcade shooter makes full use of the NDK, your microSD card, and a custom sound driver to bring a gaming experience hotter than pretty much anything we've seen on Android thus far; the only catch is that you need Android 2.0 or up and a phone with a dedicated GPU to get it going. It's available now in the Market for a seemingly reasonable $3.99 -- and let's let this serve as a reminder to other game studios that they've got the tools and the horsepower to rock Android hard. Follow the break for video of ExZeus in action.
