I’ve heard a lot of people claim that the gamepad is dead – doomed to be replaced by touch screens. I disagree with this sentiment.  There’s nothing wrong with mobile games using cool new control schemes that make good use of touch screens – but if I’m playing a game that was designed with gamepads in mind, like Shadowgun, why can’t I just use a real controller?

Well, now I can – and so can you. Check out gamepad support now being added in upcoming Unity 4 for BlackBerry 10:

After years of being frustrated by touch screen gamepads, I’m excited about bringing physical gamepad support to the Native SDK for BlackBerry 10. By making use of the new Gamepad API features developers can make their games work with physical controllers, giving their players the tactile responsiveness they’re used to from consoles and desktop PCs. When this is combined with BlackBerry 10’s built-in HDMI connectivity, you end up with a console experience in your pocket!

Here is another video showcasing gamepad pairing instructions and a racer sample on GamePlay3D that now supports not only desktop gamepad support but also BlackBerry 10:

Before you get started implementing this in your own game, I want to answer a few of the most common questions people ask me about the API.

1. What gamepads are supported right now?
   1. The SteelSeries Free.
   2. The Gametel.
   3. The Wii Remote.  Note that currently only the core buttons on the remote itself are supported – that means no attachments and no motion controls, just the D-Pad and other buttons.
2. If new gamepads come out, do I have to update my game to support them?
   1. No, you don’t!  When new controllers become available, we’ll update the mappings in a system update and your game will start receiving gamepad inputs from the new hardware.  Because the Gamepad API is an abstraction above HID, and because we map each gamepad’s unique HID report format to the Gamepad API, you don’t need to write any code that’s specific to a single controller.
3. Do users need to install anything to set up or configure their gamepads?
   1. No.  The Gamepad API is integrated into the Screen library, the same library you are already using to handle touch, keyboard, and other input events.  All users have to do is pair their device through the Bluetooth settings screen for it to start sending inputs to your game.

We realize there are other gamepads out there and continue to work towards supporting as many devices as possible. If you know of a Bluetooth, HID-compatible game controller that’s not supported yet, please let us know in the comments. Meanwhile, the fact that you won’t have to change your code when we add more devices to the list means you only help yourself (and your users) by starting to use this new feature right away.

Here’s a tutorial that should get you up and running. It includes plenty of code snippets and is based on this open-source sample project, which started as a little app I whipped up to test the new API. It eventually turned into a demo of two-player connectivity and a configuration screen.  I hope you find it useful.

Please, for the sake of everyone who’s ever been frustrated by touch controls, try this new feature and leave your feedback – I’m eager to do what I can to help if you have any trouble.  Most of all, I’m looking forward to playing your games with a real gamepad!

Links:

• Tutorial
• Sample code
• SteelSeries Free
• Gametel

Device Models

BlackBerry 10 device models will have two different radio variants: 4G HSPA+ and 4G LTE.

Chipset Specifications

Game developers are often required to take hardware-specific features into consideration, such as CPU and GPU speeds, supported texture compression formats and display resolution. To make your life a bit easier, we are providing the following chart, showing all of the display and chipset configurations for the new BlackBerry 10 and existing BlackBerry PlayBook tablet models:

OpenGL ES support

All chipsets for BlackBerry 10 will continue to support OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 with several common extensions. There are also several vendor-specific extensions available, although aside from texture compression extensions, these are typically not required for developing a high quality game.

The most important thing to call out for game developers is that there are two different GPUs available across all the BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry PlayBook models. All though the selected GPUs are on par with one another, game developers need to understand that they can create two separate BAR files on models that have different GPUs. Here is the major consideration for this:

Texture Compression

Texture compression is becoming more commonly used in mobile games since texture data often takes up a large bulk of your game assets. Not only does texture compression drastically reduce the memory footprint of your game, it can also result in significant performance gains, especially during level loading. Depending on your game title, the loss in texture quality introduced by compression may or may not be tolerable. However, for very large mobile games that will reach sizes close to or above 1GB, texture compression becomes more of a necessity.

Thankfully, using texture compression is quite easy! The steps required are usually as follows:

1. Compress images offline using texture compression tools or game engines that typically includes them for all the major GPUs on the market.
2. Create a different build configuration for each target chipset that requires a different texture compression format and add the correct compressed textures to each configuration.
3. Write texture loading code to read the texture data into an OpenGL texture, passing the correct compressed texture format parameter.

For a good reference of how to apply dynamic loading of textures supporting various vendor formats, check out the GamePlay 3D framework at www.gameplay3d.org. The Texture class, found directly in the repository at https://github.com/blackberry/GamePlay/blob/master/gameplay/src/Texture.cpp contains code for loading such textures. The sample gameplay-samples/sample06-racer, also found in the repository, demonstrates how to setup your IDE project to have 2 different BlackBerry packaging outputs for different sets of compressed files.

Texture Compression Format and Packaging (1 or 2 BAR files)

Now that you are planning to consider texture compression, you need to decide which images you want to compress and what quality and format to use. You may want to avoid compressing certain textures that require higher quality, such as those used in user interfaces, fonts and main characters. For those that you do plan to compress, there are a couple common options to choose from:

Scenario #1: Lower Quality Compression with One Generic .BAR File

If you are able to use 16-bit compressed textures with no alpha and uncompressed textures for all other images, you can use the ETC1 texture compression format. This format is supported on all BlackBerry 10 and PlayBook models, meaning you need only make a single .BAR file to distribute.

Scenario #2: Higher Quality Compression with Two Vendor Specific .BAR Files

If you require higher quality compression or alpha in your compressed textures, then you must choose to use a vendor specific compression format. This means that you will need at least two different .BAR files to distribute to support all the BlackBerry 10 and PlayBook models.

Vendor GPU SDK’s and Texture Tools

Imagination PowerVR SDK with Texture Tool:

http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/sdkdownloads/index.asp

Qualcomm Adreno SDK with Texture Tool:

https://developer.qualcomm.com/download/adreno-sdk.zip

BlackBerry World + .BAR File Distribution

The developer portal for BlackBerry World will allow developers the ability to upload either a single .BAR file for each model. However, on models like the BlackBerry 10 All Touch and PlayBook shown below that have 2 GPU (Imagination GPU and Qualcomm GPU), developers may choose to upload 2 separated BAR files with different compressed textures in each. When the user downloads the game from BlackBerry World they get the appropriate BAR file for the device chipset. See BlackBerry World here:

Crank up the Graphic Effects and Rendering Techniques – Now in HD…

BlackBerry 10 devices push it to the limits with top GPUs models supporting leading edge graphics effects and rendering techniques used in today’s mobile games. Expect to see performance increases in a magnitude of 2x-4x in both Dual Core CPUs and GPU performance making them ready for all the next wave of kick butt gaming on the platform. New BlackBerry 10 owners will love the new gaming experiences they will get on these devices with emphasis on HD gaming and great gaming hardware to support it.

Sean Paul Taylor here from the RIM® Gaming Team. We have all been busy working towards bringing the latest and greatest game titles to the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ platform and getting them ready for the BlackBerry 10 launch. My team has been working on a very deep down, technical level with game studios and have been putting the new BlackBerry 10 devices to their guns with exciting new content. We have also been doing heavy battle testing of various, new upcoming external game engine technologies and some of our own internal to share as well!

Today we are announcing the latest version of gameplay3d v1.5.

For those unfamiliar, gameplay is an open-source and cross-platform C++ game framework that we have contributed out along with the community on github. Lately it has really been picking up steam in the 3D indie communities. Our focus in creating the gameplay3d framework was to deliver a high-quality, minimalistic 3D game framework that helps game studios understand our platform better. People have been looking into the source code of the framework (library, tools and samples) and it has been helping people understand the details on how to easily go cross-platform and how to easily include BlackBerry with very little efforts.

New features

• Linux support (tested on Ubuntu 12.04 LTE 64-bit)
• Linux development environment (via CMake or CodeBlock 10 IDE)
• Vehicle physics support (via new PhysicsVehicle and PhysicsVehicleWheel classes)
• Gamepad support for Xbox360, PS3 and Bluetooth® HID controllers on desktops systems.
• Touch gesture support for tap, swipe and pinch.
• Configurable multi-sampling anti-aliasing support.
• New gameplay-tests app for easily learning basic engine features.
• New public community forums directly off the website at www.gameplay3d.org/forums
• File formats documentation for game.config .scene, .material, .animation, .physics, .particle
• Visual Studio Plug-in (beta) support for BlackBerry PlayBook 2.0 and BlackBerry 10.

The ‘next’ branch features for v1.6, v1.7

• AI path finding with navigation meshes
• Terrain and Water
• Asset Pipeline improvements

Sean Paul Taylor here again with some great news about gameplay, our open-source and cross-platform C++ game framework. gameplay version 1.4 is now available!  Since my last introductory announcement of gameplay v1.2, we have made some good progress and have added new features:

New features

• Lua script bindings on all public interfaces of the framework.
• Script binding generator tool for creating user-defined Lua script bindings from Doxygen XML.
• AI state machine for AI programming/scripting on game objects.
• Virtual gamepad input support with custom theming using UI system.
• Optimizations using NEON math for mobile platforms.
• Compressed texture support for DXT, PVRTC, ATC and ETC1.
• Improved modular shaders with support for #include in shaders and new light map support.
• Optimizations and Improvements to the UI system such as inertial scrolling and scrollbars.
• Pre-built versions of the gameplay-encoder and gameplay-luagen tools.
• Optimizations in animation and physics.
• Fixes to support Maya 2012/2013 COLLADA DAE_FBX export.
• FBX 2013 format support.

The ‘next’ branch features for v1.5, v1.6, v1.7

• Linux support.
• Vehicle physics.
• AI path finding with navigation meshes.
• Physical Gamepad input for Xbox 360, Wii, and Bluetooth® HID controllers.
• Terrain.
• Scene editor tool.

We’re extremely committed to the open source community and invite you to contribute on our projects.

Happy gaming!

I’m Sean Paul Taylor, Team Lead for Gaming R&D here at Research In Motion® (RIM®). We’re very excited to announce the latest release of our open-source, cross-platform C++ game development framework – gameplay.

The gameplay project is contributed to and hosted on github.com by the two co-founders of the project, myself and Steve Grenier. We are focused on ensuring that the BlackBerry® 10 game development platform is at the top of its game and Steve and I, along with a team of top-notch graphics and game developers here at RIM, will be diligently contributing to the framework and sharing with the community.

My vision and goal with gameplay is to contribute and share outwardly our expert knowledge of advanced graphics and game technologies. Not only has my team been busy porting all the leading open-source game technologies for BlackBerry, but we have been having a ton of fun too!

In the past, I have worked on previous research projects using advanced rendering technologies like deferred shading, post processing and scene graph rendering. We see a roadmap where the mobile and pc/console gaming worlds converge and we are working hard to take BlackBerry gaming to the front of the lines.

The gameplay project is a contribution that is directly targeting the indie game developer ecosystem. We realize developers want to easily target as many platforms as they can to monetize and we want to help you do this… If you are familiar with other popular open-source 2D game engines like cocos2d-x and now want a high-quality 3D solution, then gameplay might be exactly what you are looking for!

Current features in gameplay

• Written completely in C++ and well documented using doxygen.
• Solution and workspaces for Visual Studio 2010, XCode 3.2.1 and Momentics IDE’s.
• Platform-Game abstraction layer separating all operating system code from game engine code.
• Input system support for Mouse, Keyboard and Touch.
• Full vector math library with classes for Vector2/3/4, Matrix, Quaternion, Ray, Plane. Also Frustum and BoundingBox/BoundingSphere classes for object culling.
• Solid OpenGL 3.2+ (for Desktop) and OpenGL ES 2.0 (for Mobile) based rendering system with classes for RenderState, FrameBuffer, Mesh, Material, Effect, Pass and Techniques.
• Easy-to-use and efficient Font and Sprite classes.
• Scene-graph components such as Scene, Node, Light, Camera and Model.
• Binary encoding tool for creating optimized bundles for loading TTF fonts and 3D game assets supporting both COLLADA and FBX formats.
• Extensible animation system with classes for Animation, AnimationClip and Curve with built-in AnimationTarget’s on Transform and MaterialParameter’s classes.
• Complete 3D audio system with additional support for compressed audio using OGG and supporting HDMI gaming.

New features in gameplay v1.2

• Newplatforms now supporting:
  • BlackBerry Tablet OS 2.0 and BlackBerry 10 ready!
  • Apple iOS 5.1 for iPhone and iPad
  • Google Android 2.3+
  • Microsoft Windows 7
  • Apple MacOSX
• New shader-based material system with built-in common shader library.
• New declarative scene binding.
• New declarative particle system.
• Improved physics system with rigid body dynamics and constraints.
• New character physics and ghost objects.
• Improved animation system supporting animated skeletal character animation.
• New declarative user interface system with support for declartive theming and ortho, and 3D form definition with built-in core control classes such as Button, Label, TextBox, Slider, CheckBox, RadioButton. Also includes Layout classes such as Absolute/Vertical and FlowLayout.
• New cross-platform new game project wizard scripts.
• New game developer guide.
• New game samples and tutorials.

Survive Demo Game (in progress)

The ‘next’ feature branch for v1.3, v1.4, v1.5

• Optimizations and Performance improvements
• Shadows
• Terrain and Sky
• Gamepad input for Wii, Xbox 360 and Bluetooth® HID controllers
• Scoreloop Social integration
• Editor

Check out the code and samples at our BlackBerry Github page and let me know what you’re working on.

• Download the BlackBerry Native SDK for Tablet OS for Windows®, Mac OS X or Linux.
• Get started with the BlackBerry Native SDK for Tablet OS by creating and deploying your first OpenGL ES application.
• Learn about the QNX® Momentics® IDE with full suite of debugging and profiling tools.

Once you’ve gotten a good start, be sure to check out the Developer’s Guide, Tutorials and Libraries available in the BlackBerry Native SDK including:

• STL and POSIX library support
• OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 for 2D and 3D graphics
• OpenAL for cross-platform 3D audio
• libpng and libjpeg for encoded images
• FreeType for fonts
• Scoreloop SDK for integrating social gaming capabilities

If you’re looking for additional resources, be sure to take advantage of blackberry.github.com, where you’ll find many Open Source game engines and libraries ported and available including:

• GamePlay: a cross-platform 3D gaming framework
• Cocos2D-X: a cross-platform mobile 2D game framework
• Box2D: a 2D physics engine
• Bullet Physics: a 3D physics engine
• ALUT: a companion toolkit to OpenAL
• Lua: a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language
• SDL: a cross-platform multimedia library

3rd party game development kits have also added support for BlackBerry® Tablet OS:

• Unity Technologies supports BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet through its Union service
• Marmalade SDK provides ‘Beta’ support for BlackBerry Tablet OS
• ShiVa3D Game Engine with Development Tools

You’ll also be able to find support for casual web gaming using Adobe® AIR®, HTML 5 and WebGL through BlackBerry® WebWorks™. Finally, you can distribute your finished game through the BlackBerry App World™ storefront with $0 registration and submission fees – browse the current BlackBerry App World game catalog to see some great examples of apps.

Got any questions about developing games for the BlackBerry platform? Leave a comment and let us know!