Transcript Java ME vs. Flash Lite

Java ME vs. Flash Lite:
A comparison of mobile phone
game development
Alex Koller
Supervisors: Greg Foster,
Madeleine Wright
Overview of Presentation
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Project Synopsis
Research Findings
Demonstration
Results
Conclusions
Future of Mobile
Game Development
Questions?
Project Synopsis
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Comparison of mobile game development
between Java ME and Flash Lite 2.1
We investigated the available APIs
Understanding capabilities of each platform
Designed and developed a cross platform
game designed to test the capabilities of Java
ME and Flash Lite
Project Synopsis Cont.
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Developing a complete game allowed us to:
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Test all aspects of game development
Test supporting functions, such as persistent data
storage, menu creation, etc.
Assemble quantitative comparison results
Research Findings
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Game types and genres
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3D games becoming more viable – phones with
increased processing power and onboard GPU
Simple and addictive game play over graphics
Simple user controls
Arcade-style games are well suited, and have
been successful on mobile phones
Research Findings Cont.
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Important features of a successful arcadestyle mobile game
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Decent speed/frames per second
Minimal memory usage
Quick return on investment – short development
time
Small file size for transfer and storage
Addictive, easy to play and fun!
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Immerse the player in the game
Research Findings Cont.
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Development Environments
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Java ME:
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Many development environments to chose from
Sun Wireless Toolkit excellent free choice
Comes with many utilities for emulating, testing, method
profiling, memory monitoring, etc.
Flash Lite:
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Flash CS3 Professional is the only option
Propriety software (US$600)
Crashed multiple times while developing, emulator
occasionally refused to run
Research Findings Cont.
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Development Environments Compared
Development Environment
Start-Up Time (seconds) *
Memory Usage (mb) **
Netbeans
25.6
121
Eclipse
13.2
67
IntelliJ IDEA
24.6
140
3.4
33
20.4
89
Java Wireless Toolkit
Flash CS3 Professional
** Average of five successive start-ups
** Initial memory usage immediately after start-up
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Development Time
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Roughly three weeks for each platform
Demonstration
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Black Sky is a top-down perspective, arcadestyle, tile-based game
Both implementations are almost identical
Black Sky
(Java ME)
Black Sky
(Flash Lite)
Results
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Frames Per Second
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Average FPS over 30 second period:
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Java ME: 22.91
Flash Lite: 19.75
Memory Usage
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Peak memory usage over one minute period:
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Java ME: 516 kb
Flash Lite: 1032 kb
Java ME peaks when initialising, while Flash Lite
continues to rise, peaking at the end.
Results Cont.
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Lines of Code
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Java ME more ‘complete’ than Flash Lite version
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Java ME: 3000 lines
Flash Lite: 1000 lines
Final file size:
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Most mobile phone games aim for ≤ 200kb
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Java ME: 81.5 kb
Flash Lite: 59.3 kb
Results Cont.
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Problems Encountered:
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Java ME:
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Creating GUIs required some trial and error – can only
be created programmatically
Flash Lite:
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Flash CS3 does not natively support MIDI – requires a
laborious 10 step workaround
Difficulty creating a tile-based game engine without
BitmapData object (introduced in Flash 8)
Input validation (button presses) too slow for fast-paced
games – results in unresponsive controls
Conclusions
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Both Java ME and Flash Lite are capable
mobile game development platforms
Java ME is more mature than Flash Lite
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Java ME has been in use for many years
Flash Lite is a relatively new platform
Java ME has more variety in development
environments
Conclusions Cont.
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The game we created allowed us to perform
comprehensive testing on both platforms
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Memory usage and frames per second
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Number of lines of code and final file size
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Java ME outperformed Flash Lite in these two vital tests
Flash Lite achieved better results
Java ME is better than Flash Lite
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For almost all aspects of mobile game
development, we found Java ME enabled us to
achieve our goals more precisely and easily
Future of Mobile Game Dev.
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Java ME
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Solid development being made on the Java ME framework,
specifically the gaming APIs
Over 1 million developers currently using Java ME
Flash Lite
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Flash Lite 3.0 recently released
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Focus is on video/multimedia, not game development
Based on Flash 8 (still no BitmapData object though)
At this stage, Java ME is staying ahead of Flash Lite
in terms of mobile game development
Questions?