Full list of in-depth articles - Feedback and questions - Request demo -

This article describes a lightweight, high-speed software production process converting simple textual configuration parameters into complete packages, each containing a complete mobile game. The sample production process requires from the operator no programming skills.

Two recent articles on this website introduced two other generators capable of producing complete smartphone applications (form editors in C++, shopping lists in Java) for the Series 60 Platform, built on the Symbian OS, currently the leading smartphone platform in the world.

1 - Customized 3-D Maze applications

The mobile game generator described in this article builds 3-D maze-traversing games based on an example contained in the Series 60 2nd Edition SDK for Symbian OS Supporting Feature Pack 2 for MIDP. Refer to appendix A of this article for detailed information about the example.

By means of a textual configuration file defining four parameters it is possible to produce 3-D maze games that differ in look, size of the maze, and complexity of the maze structure. A fifth parameter may also instruct the generator to compile, package and run the generated application in the smartphone emulator, thus allowing for an end-to-end serial production of the different games.

The following pictures show some examples of the configuration file and of the player's views (front view, top view) in the generated games.

1.1 - Starred Sky maze

This configuration produces the same game as the one provided in the SDK.

1.2 - Forget Me Not maze

This configuration produces a maze with higher walls and less corridors than the Starred Sky maze. This theme features a "Forget me not" background and different wall and floor colors.

1.3 - Get Out maze

This configuration produces a maze with longer sides, higher walls and more corridors than the Starred Sky maze. The Get Out theme features different floor and walls, and a beautiful sea landscape (derived from a standard Windows 2000 wallpaper) surrounding the maze. When exiting the maze the player gains a complete view of the landscape.

2 - Configuration approach

The custom generator used for this article applies a specified configuration at source-code level before compile time. This is a different approach, compared to the most frequent approach where applications configure themselves at run time, based on external configuration files. What are the benefits of source-code configuring?

• The approach is language-independent: the same mechanism can be coherently applied for instance to C++ applications, thus providing a common configuration process across different application provision channels;

• The application is simpler: less code is required, as the configuration logic can be exported to the production process; the application memory footprint and start-up time are also improved;

• Specifically for Java mobile applications, a recent article on Sun Developer Network ("MIDP Application Properties") noted that application properties should always be defined consistently in the application descriptor and in the manifest, and recommended to not "stuff a lot of data in the descriptor, though, because some platforms limit the descriptor size". By pre-configuring the application before compile time the application properties can altogether be removed from both descriptor and manifest.

3 - Running the generator

The 3-D maze generator runs as a single command in a Windows 2000/XP command window, and automatically builds, packages and starts the produced application (if required in the configuration file). The picture below shows the generator producing the Get Out maze.

As mentioned earlier in the article, the generator requires less than one and a half second to generate the source code, compile it, and produce a complete JAD (Java Application Descriptor) file and the corresponding JAR file.

Appendix A - The 3-D Maze example application

The reference development environment for this article is the Series 60 2nd Edition SDK for Symbian OS Supporting Feature Pack 2 for MIDP. Within the J2ME (Java 2 Mobile Edition) context, MIDP stands for Mobile Information Device Profile: see java.sun.com/products/midp for more information.

The Series 60 MIDP SDK is available after registration on www.forum.nokia.com. It contains several example applications, one of which is the 3-D Maze Example used for the custom-made generator described in this article.

Quoting from the description of the example application in the Series 60 MIDP SDK documentation, "This example application demonstrates how to use Mobile 3-D Graphics API. The game developed in this example is a maze-traversing game, where the player looks at the world from a first-person point of view. The game is intended as a demonstration to show some of the features included in M3G API".

The following picture, also taken from the SDK documentation, shows the Class Diagram of the application.