ARM Community: Compulsive Browser Games: Bringing Mobile Gaming To Life - ARM Community

Ever sat in a boring meeting or at an airport wondering if your crops on Farmville are withering and whether you need to go and harvest them (Farmville: an online farm simulation game available on Facebook) or want to get onto an online Texas Hold’em poker game with your friends. Such social casual games played online, via a web browser, have exploded in the last year. Zynga, the maker of Farmville and other Flash based games have more than 170 million active users today.

Let’s examine when and how these types of compulsive games will be available on your mobile phones.

The trend is shifting from console based games distribution to making games available through a web browser and played inside the browser. This is becoming very successful for a number of reasons: games are easy to launch and don’t need specialised software, other than an internet browser and some plug-ins; the ability to enable the “free to play” model with in-game premium items for purchase, making it easier for publishers to control games as they start to live on the cloud and enabling users quicker access to games without going through standard payment process. Another important fact is that with upcoming technology improvements, browser games will now be able to utilise the graphics processing unit (GPU), already built into the hardware of devices, using OpenGL® ES 2.0 features for high performance graphics and real world realism.

But why are the graphics so basic today and currently don’t provide a similar experience to native games on mobile devices? Some reasons being that new mobile devices supporting Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 are only just starting to appear in the market; secondly most of the current games have been designed for mouse input and larger screens. Adapting these to the smaller screen with touch input have their own challenges for developers. See CNET’s report on trying Farmville on a Google Nexus One device.



The future seems bright. Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is now taking advantage of OpenGL ES 2.0 to render all graphical elements, to increase graphics performance. The new hardware rendering capability available in Flash Player 10.1 uses the GPU to draw graphics and composite graphics elements. This allows the CPU to do more processing in terms of action script and putting more display objects onto the screen, without worrying about how they actually get to the screen.

Another alternative also might come in the form of WebGL . Technically WebGL is a binding of Javascript with OpenGL ES 2.0 implementations. WebGL was designed to enable web developers to use OpenGL ES 2.0 features inside web pages. This allows a richer and smoother experience than is currently available via web widgets. Google Chrome, Webkit, Opera and Mozilla have pledged support for WebGL in their browsers. While Adobe Flash Player 10.1 supports some 3D today, a combination of Adobe Flash and WebGL could be a serious platform in the future game deployment. It remains to be seen if this technology marriage happens.

To get more information on OpenGL ES 2.0 in embedded applications ARM recently presented a webinar that you can access here.

Srinivas Gattamneni, Head of Ecosystem Development, ARM, has been in the Information and Communications industries all his working life. In his previous role at Motorola, he was responsible for mobile application software procurement and previous to that he spent 3 years in China building a mobile application platform team. Currently based in UK, his responsibility includes building strategic partnerships in the consumer devices content industry and seeding growth of a strong ecosystem on multimedia products that would fuel next generation consumer devices.

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