Microsoft must open up device to compete with iOS as a gaming platform, says mobile dev
Windows Phone 7 needs to open up to more triple-A gaming engines like Unity and UDK if it is to succeed as a gaming platform, a smartphone developer has said.
Critical Thoughts Games president David Whatley said that whilst Mango has made the device more user and developer friendly in some aspects, the smartphone was seriously handicapped by being a closed system.
“The real missing element for game developers is the lack of triple-A gaming engines,” Whatley told PocketGamer.biz.
“Because of Microsoft's closed system there is no representation from Unreal Development Kit or Unity 3D. This is a serious handicap to a platform that aspires to be a gaming platform the equal of iOS.”
He added however that Mango was on its way to providing developer’s options like on the iOS.
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He said the new operating system could run games at 60fps instead of 30fps, and from a developer standpoint it has a unified environment, solid hardware minimum specifications, great tools and solid frameworks.
Critical Thoughts Games has developed iPhone games such as GeoSpark and Geo-Defence, the latter of which Whatley said is being updated to support Mango features such as fast app switching and live tiles.
It's not going to happen. WP7 has no support for native applications, or OpenGL. Microsoft will now finally feel the pain of having a platform that's not supported.
Same goes for Windows 8 ARM.
...doesn't it support XNA? What's stopping gameengine-middleware devs from implementing an xna-based runtime for their content tools?
Though UDK or Unity are not the only engines around, they are the most popular, and having them aboard means aligning with other platforms.
Game engine middleware creating an XNA port of the engine is close as world peace :) why would they develop a specialized version of their engine for a marketshare that is not yet established?
I believe the Microsoft provides native support for their partners to run native code for the phone (not sure if this is a rumor or a fact), if so, they should give the same privilege to engine makers...
