In the latest demonstration of Palm’s support for (and appreciation of) the third-party development community, the company has posted a list of developers ready and able to assist others in creating or porting apps for webOS on its Developer Center. While Palm and HP are careful to point out that they “can’t guarantee your results, of course – your mileage will vary,” the list is a nice way for developers to get themselves some attention (from Palm as well as potential customers). Palm has also included an e-mail link for those not yet on the list to see if they qualify to be added.

Source: Palm Developer Center (via akitayo in our forums)
 

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Stonetrip has added webOS support to the latest iteration of its ShiVa 3D gaming engine, and developers now have another weapon to add to their arsenal (including the excellent Unreal Engine 3) for developing and porting PDK applications. For those not in the know, ShiVa is a game builder that offers a graphical WYSIWYG editor and has full support for both OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 along with a whole slew of important 3D technologies including advanced shading and the automatic handling of post-rendering effects.

The engine powers a whole laundry list of games available on the iOS platform, and a quick perusal of some of those titles on Stonetrip’s website should whet the appetite of many a webOS user, as many of them are sure to pop up in the App Catalog given how easy it is to write once and deploy on multiple platforms with ShiVa.

Interested parties should hit the source link for details on how to get into the beta and head on over to the Palm Developer Forums for further discussion.  

Source: Stonetrip’s ShiVa blog; thanks to dcforever for the tip!

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Aaron Ardiri is in the process of porting Lemmings (one of our favorite games of all time) to webOS. He’s liveblogging the whole experience over at mobile1up.com and he looks to have a playable demo in less than 24 hours as of this writing. The port is an "as-is" port from the PalmOS version to both iPhone and the Palm Pre and Ardiri intends to release it to the App Catalog for free in time for the PDK Hot Apps program.

It’s an impressive project and we’re pretty darn excited about it – you can see that it’s possible to work on an iPhone and webOS version of the same app at the same time without a huge additional effort. Palm has built the PDK from the ground-up to make it easy to port existing iPhone apps over, but it’s also great to know that developing a game for multiple platforms is just as easy.

Source: Lemmings Blog at mobile1up via PreCentral forums, @teckiegirl, ZDNet, & webosroundup

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Palm loyalists out there will undoubtedly remember the name MetaView. Back in the days of PalmOS, he rose to fame with apps like PalmPDF (now named PDFmob), 2PlayMe, and notably Duke3D, a PalmOS Duke Nukem 3D port that won the Zodiac France Contest 2006.

MetaView has been developing for webOS for a while now, with releases like Match This!, MapTool, and ÜberRadio. Now, he’s returning to an old favourite and is bringing Duke3D to webOS.

Posted on his blog, Henk "MetaView" Jonas shares the above video of Duke3D working smoothly on his Pre. According to his post, the controls can be used all in the keyboard or alternatively use the screen as a virtual d-pad and have the rest of the controls in the keyboard (similar to Quake).

Interestingly, MetaView has told PreCentral that:

"The porting was really easy. Just some small source and makefile adjustments and both jfbuild and jfduke did compile and link. Not at all comparable with the old Palm OS where I needed several days just to get it compiled and another couple of days to have it running without crashes."

Seems the boasts of quick app porting to the webOS holds some weight. That certainly raises my spirits for the webOS platform as a whole.

Duke3D is now available for the Palm Pre and Pre Plus in the WebOS-Internals testing feed for those brave enough to try it while it’s still in-testing.

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Fresh on the triumph of getting Doom and Quake working and playable, the webOS Internals team is working on getting an entire existing game environment running on the Pre: ScummVM.

For those that aren’t familiar with it, ScummVM is a multi-platform virtual machine for games developed using LucasArts’ SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion), and includes classic Lucasfilm games like Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit the Road as well as games from Activision, Adventuresoft, SierraAGI (Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards!) Humongous Entertainment (the Freddi Fish series) and many more. (The complete current ScummVM compatibility list is here.)

More details – and a video – after the break!

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