March 25th 2010 | Posted by
Robert Werlinger
For those of you who have been wondering what makes the Plug-in Development Kit tick and how it fits in to the overall webOS picture, Palm’s presentation earlier this month at the Game Developer Conference has been made available at the GDC Vault website (direct link to the video not available – it’s towards the bottom of the page) (registration required).
The 40-minute long video is complete with an overview of the technology, a lengthy coding demonstration, and an enlightening Q&A session. Highlights include the demonstration of how SDK and PDK elements can seamlessly work together inside of a single application, how easy it is to deploy PDK apps to the device for for testing and debugging, and details of Palm’s plans with the technology before allowing developers to release applications incorporating the technology "before the middle of the year."
The prospects are exciting, and not just for the gaming world. Seeing how easy it is for developers to utilize the PDK for more CPU intensive tasks in their regular apps – things like audio processing (Shazam, anyone?) and OpenGL based transformations that are difficult to do with interpreted coding languages like JavaScript – make the future of the App Catalog, and indeed the platform itself, seem bright indeed.
Thanks to argyledx for the tip!
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March 11th 2010 | Posted by
Dieter Bohn
As Palm reports on their blog, Epic Games has demoed their Unreal Engine 3 on the Palm Pre. Unreal Engine 3 is the ‘gaming engine’ behind lots of your favorite console style games – from Gears of War to Batman: Arkham Asylum to BioShock to, well, a lot of games. We humbly assume it’s because we asked for this in December.
Naturally it would be a little overly optimistic to hope for console-level graphics and gamelength on a mobile phone, but if you were wondering if webOS had the potential to run with the big dogs when it comes to mobile gaming, the answer is yes. It’s all possible, of course, because of the PDK. If you missed it, we’ve got a video interview with Palm discussion the philosophy and possibilities of the PDK.
UPDATE: The folks at Engadget were able to get a video demonstration (above) of Unreal Engine running on a Pre Plus at GDC, and it’s pretty darned slick (though apparently not incredibly stable just yet).
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March 9th 2010 | Posted by
Dieter Bohn
Palm has released their Plug-in Development Kit Beta for developers to allow them to create rich, 3D games and other native linux apps for webOS. The PDK is available now at the Developer Center.
Palm looks to be making a pretty big push with this – they’ve released at the Game Developer’s Conference and are pushing that they are offering great gaming experiences on multiple carriers:
"Palm webOS is the go-to platform for great games on two of the three leading carrier networks," said Katie Mitic, senior vice president, Product Marketing, Palm, Inc. "We have both the developer tools and the hardware necessary for a world-class gaming experience, and an impressive portfolio of webOS game titles from top-notch developers to show for it."
Full press release after the break. So, developers: how’s it look? Legend79 emailed us to note that Palm has chosen to use Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) for hardware access – which to us looks like yet another way to enable easy porting.
read more
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March 5th 2010 | Posted by
Dieter Bohn
Palm will be presenting at the Game Developer’s Conference next week and naturally they’ll be talking about games and the Plug-in Development Kit. One thing we’ve been speculating on in the PalmCast is what exactly this PDK looks like to a developer. We’re supposed to find out as it comes out of beta later this month, but given how quickly Gameloft has ported their iPhone games over, we sort of wondered whether the PDK was essentially built from the ground up with an eye towards making it easy to port iPhone games and apps over to webOS.
Apparently, that’s exactly what it is, as John Paczkowski notes:
Perhaps more importantly, the PDK will allow devs to rewrite mobile apps that they’ve built for other platforms to run on webOS with minimal modifications. iPhone apps can be ported over in a matter of days, sources close to the company tell me, and they don’t really suffer any degradation in performance.
Hey, we’re not complaining – easy porting means more apps and that sounds grand to us. Just one thing, Palm, we don’t know how this "matter of days" thing works, but just remember that Apple hasn’t exactly been reticent with their patent hammer of late, okay?
Our colleague Rene Ritchie of TiPb will be at GDC 10 and will bring us more on what Palm has to show next week!
Update: @Adora ups the ante: "I’ve even heard hours"
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January 28th 2010 | Posted by
Derek Kessler
We’ve all wondered what Palm would be talking about in March when they present at the Game Developers Conference, but now we’re getting a better idea. We have confirmed with Palm that the clearly awesome webOS Plug-in Development Kit will be released as a public beta in March. Putting two and two together, we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the PDK beta announced at GDC. In fact, we’d be surprised if it wasn’t (assuming it’s not unveiled beforehand). The full 1.0 release for the PDK is expected at some point later in 2010.
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January 20th 2010 | Posted by
Derek Kessler
While Palm’s spiffy new PDK (Plug-in Development Kit) is right now limited to bringing fancy binary apps to webOS only from a few select developers, that isn’t going to stop Palm from showing it off to the masses. To that end, Palm will be presenting at this year’s Game Developers Conference. GDC will be taking place in March in San Francisco, just up the road from Palm’s Sunnyvale headquarters.
The hour-long presentation, scheduled for 3:00 pm on March 12, has a title that tells us pretty much everything we need to know: “An Overview to Creating Games with Palm’s Plug-in Development Kit (PDK)”. But that’s not all, there’s also a description if that left you hungering for more:
“Come learn how to take full advantage of the advanced hardware capabilities of Palm’s webOS devices–including full OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 support–using the recently announced Plug-in Development Kit (PDK). This technical session will provide an architectural overview of Palm’s hardware and software platforms and then provide hands-on details for how the PDK exposes these capabilities.”
Which makes us say “Ooooooh.” Will we see new game announcements? Considering that they’re planning to demonstrate the PDK to game developers, we wouldn’t be surprised if the PDK becomes widely available around that same time.
Thanks to Baryn for the tip!
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