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Description of  Micro Java Game Development

About the Author David Fox works for Next Game, Inc., creating Web and wirelessmultiplayer games. Prior to that, his design and development credits includeMichael Crichton's "Westworld 2000," Fox Interactive's"X-Files: Unauthorized Access," and PlayLink's real-time strategy"Citizen 01." He is the author of several best-selling books aboutInternet technologies, and his writing frequently appears in publications suchas Salon.com, Gamasutra, and Developer.com. David has presented topics in Javagaming at Sun Microsytem's JavaOne conference for the past three years, andhas been the winner of the Motorola-Nextel Developer Challenge for the past twoyears. Roman Verhovsek is CEO and co-founder of Cocoasoft Ltd., where he isleading a team of J2ME developers. He holds a bachelor's degree inelectrical engineering from the University of Ljubljana, and is working on hismaster's degree of computer science. Since early 1996, he has focusedprimarily on Java technologies, and for last two years in particular onJava-enabled small devices. In 2001 he held a lecture on J2ME game developmentat the JavaOne conference. In his other life, Roman enjoys cooking,mountaineering, jogging, and traveling with his girlfriend, Lina. 0672323427AB04222002 Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Everything I Wanted to Know About Micro Java Gaming But Was Afraid to Ask A New Era of Gaming Ah, games. Games have almost a religious, ritual aspect to them. They allow people to enter together into a higher state of being, pushing skills to new limits and experiences to new heights. They allow ordinary people to experience extraordinary emotions--the emotions of the warrior, the king, the spy, and the lover--while remaining protected in a safe environment. Now all this might sound like a bit of a heavy-handed way to describe Frogger, but it's fair to say that games transport us and amuse us in ways that no other form of entertainment can. A Brief History of Games Games have been with humanity since the beginning. A 5000-year-old Mancala-like game board, carved from stone, was recently unearthed in the Sahara. The game of Go, popular in Oriental countries, has reportedly been around since 2000 B.C. Backgammon-like games such as Tabula and Nard are talked about in ancient Roman scripts, and even in the Bible. And Tarot decks, initially used to help predict the future, evolved into today's Bicycle playing cards. A decade or two ago, the only games that people spent much time with were professional sports, board games like Monopoly and Chess, paper and dice games such as Dungeons and Dragons, and card games like Poker or Hearts. Some games were for heavy money, some were bone-jarringly competitive, but most were just about good clean fun. phones because land-line access and Internet service are too expensive. According to the Yankee Group, people in the United States spend 50% more time commuting than in any other country. This is the perfect time to pull out a mobile phone and play some quick games. Additionally, Datamonitor has researched people's game-playing behaviors in Asia, Europe, and the United States, and has concluded that most people like to play wireless games on evenings and weekends. In the near future, we will likely see micro devices become even smaller and more specialized. Phones the size of earplugs, voice-activated assistants on wristwatches, and smart chips on credit cards are all becoming a reality.This is a continuation of the paradigm shift that began in the 1970s, with microcomputers taking the power away from huge, monolithic mainframes. Clearly, millions of small devices working together yields much more distributed power than one big, central device. Unsurprisingly, games are keeping up and even helping to lead this paradigm. While it might seem silly to try to achieve a rich, meaningful immersion on a tiny 100Yen100 pixel screen, there's one thing mobile phone games give you that even the best consoles can't provide: They're always with you, and can be played anywhere you go. This not only means that games can now be more convenient, but wholly new types of games can be designed that take advantage of new lifestyles. Enter Micro Java The Java language, created by Sun Microsystems, is another example of a paradigm shift. As a language that had no pointers or complicated memory operations, was object-oriented, secure, and could run on most any browser or platform, application development suddenly opened up to the masses in a way that never seemed possible before. Java made it possible for millions of programmers to create quality applications in record time and quantities. The Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME), or Micro Java, as we'll call it in this book, is an attempt to take the best aspects of Java and pare them down for smaller devices such as mobile phones; set-top boxes that add interactivity to television, pagers, handheld organizers and personal data assistants (PDAs); as well as embedded chips that you find in devices such as refrigerators, microwaves, "smart" credit cards, and automobiles. * Paperback: 576 pages * Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (April 28, 2002) * Language: English * ISBN-10: 0672323427 * ISBN-13: 978-0672323423