opengl

For Developers: Kanzi – a cross platform development environment with OpenGL support

February 2, 2010 | By Surur

Kanzi™ is a complete solution for design and deployment of advanced graphical user interfaces. It sports a complete toolchain to take products from design stages to target devices. Kanzi solution is technologically scalable from mobile and embedded devices to automotive applications. As a platform independent solution, Kanzi offers easy portability and rapid production cycle.

Key advantage of the Kanzi solution is "design-once, deploy everywhere" cross-platform support for the leading mobile operating systems, including Android, Blackberry, Linux, Maemo, Moblin, iPhone OS, Palm Web OS, Symbian OS, and Windows Mobile. Kanzi solution is build on top of industry standard OpenGL ES graphics API.

In terms of designer’s work flow, Kanzi provides the missing link between today’s leading 3D graphics content creation tools, such as 3DS Max, Maya and XSI on the one hand, and cell phones on the other hand. Artists can easily export their designs from these software packages to Kanzi SDK using COLLADA data format. Designers then rapidly compose the actual user interface application and apply all 3D graphics effects within the Kanzi SDK itself. The tool features a desktop runtime of the Kanzi engine to bring a real-time view of the final application at the desktop. This feature eliminates the need to continuously build the project to target device during development in order to inspect it. Therefore, design cycle shortens substantially while the designer is better able to realize her vision.

Kanzi runtime can be integrated to a wide variety of target devices, even those with different operating systems and hardware architectures. Applications made with Kanzi SDK will execute properly in all these devices, thus giving greater return on investment for the application developer.

Kanzi features a unified pipeline for OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenGL ES 1.x based 3D graphics. The engine supports real-time streaming of data, texture and fragment shaders, multi-texturing and dynamic lighting. There is also a versatile animation framework supporting key frame animations, such as vertex, object and bone based animations.

Rightware will demonstrate a Mobile App Store application running in various mobile devices at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 15th through February 18th. Mobile App Store is designed and implemented using Kanzi user interface solution that enables designers to quickly have their applications running in different target devices.

Read more about the Kanzi platform here.

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Great things of 2009 N0. 9 – hardware accelerated graphics

December 31, 2009 | By Surur

The great controversy of 2008 was the lack of hardware graphics drivers on HTC’s latest devices. At the end of 2009 we can very reliably say a device will have at the very least OpenGL drivers, allowing smooth user interfaces such as TouchFlo3D also SPB Mobile Shell to amaze us with transitions, flips and fades.

While we have not seen much other software taking advantage of this, it is only a question of time before many great games such as Xact and Experiment 13 become standard on Windows Mobile, elevating the whole field.

Now I know drivers are still controversial due to imperfect implementations, but if one look the huge ruckus 18 months ago, one can really appreciate how far we have come.

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Chainfire driver patch improves HTC HD2 OpenGL performance by 500%

December 3, 2009 | By Surur

It seems HTC cant ever get it right, and in this case they once again failed to optimise their graphics drivers.

Not to worry however as uber-hacker Chainfire has rushed to the rescue with his 3D driver patch for the HTC Leo.

I would write more on the issue, but to tell the truth I do not really understand the details.

What I do understand however is the claim of much improved performance.

glBenchmark
Attached are some glBenchmark results of the various patch revisions. Some awesome improvements in the HD and Pro tests, as well as kTriangles/s.

Stock HD2 vs Patch 1.1
GLBenchmark HD ES 1.1: 487% ~ 1598 Frames up from 328
GLBenchmark HD ES 1.1 no GPU Skinning: 502% ~ 1647 Frames up from 328
GLBenchmark PRO ES 1.1: 107% ~ 229 Frames up from 215
GLBenchmark Pro ES 1.1 no GPU Skinning: 157% ~ 625 Frames up from 397
Swapbuffer speed: 496% ~ 556 up from 112
Averages: Lights: 116% ~ 1550 kTriangles/s up from 1350
Averages: Texture Filter: 159% ~ 2150 kTriangles/s up from 1350
Averages: Texture Size: 158% ~ 2150 kTriangles/s up from 1350
Averages: Triangles: 161% ~ 2150 kTriangles/s up from 1350

The patch is not compatible with all software and has two different modes, so make sure to read Chainfire’s thread in detail here before applying.

Thanks Chainfire, Jug6ernaut for the tip.

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OpenGL ES games being made for Windows Mobile

November 29, 2009 | By Surur

Our smartphones have been sporting OpenGL ES hardware acceleration for around 2 generations now, but the main software taking advantage of this has been HTC’s Touchflo3D.

Korean mobile company MindPol hopes to change this, producing software which uses OpenGL ES 1.1 to produce graphically engaging games which should work on HTC devices (MSM72xx CPU or higher) or Sony Xperia and Samsung Omnia 2.

Hopefully we will see an increasing number of companies jumping on this bandwagon, especially now that hardware acceleration has become rather standard in in the majority of Windows Mobile smartphones.

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For Developers: Tigre – You need to use this

November 20, 2009 | By Surur

The developer of Tigre have already posted about his great work on our Page 2 section, which enables OpenGL programming for .Net programmers. Then there were much concern about the speed of the resulting application, mainly due to .Net’s reputation.

The video above I think does a lot to allay those fears, with smooth rendering of a high polygon model with great lighting effects being clearly very achievable.

Read more about the open source software at philippewechsler.ch/Tigre.

By the way, if you have an application you wish to expose to hundreds of thousands of readers consider posting about it on Page 2, for free of course. No need for Phippu to get all the attention

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For Developers: Free Tigre 3D Engine

November 17, 2009 | By Phippu

Do you think Windows Mobile has no 3D Power? Then you should try some cool Tigre Demos!

Tigre (Tiny Graphics Engine) is a free rendering library for Windows Mobile 5, 6, 6.1 and 6.5 that provides you realtime and interactive rendering. Its fully written in managed C# for the .NET Compact Framework and is able to use hardware acceleration for fluid and stunning graphics.

Features

easy to use, fully object oriented
based on .NET Compact Framework 2.0
Windows Mobile 5, 6, 6.1 and 6.5 support
OpenGl ES 1.x (support for 2.0 with shaders comes later) support
full featured camera and lighting model
advanced material handling (multiple textures, render to target, alpha transparency, advanced texture filtering,…)
scene graph
wavefront obj support
2d and 3d rendering
open source

Requirements

Windows Mobile 5, 6, 6.1 or 6.5
.NET Compact Framework 2.0 or higher (mostly pre installed)
OpenGl ES 1.x enabled device or software renderer

For more information and to download see www.PhilippeWechsler.ch/Tigre.php

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HTC HD2 vs HTC Touch HD – OpenGL Stress test

November 2, 2009 | By Surur

This latest video pits the venerable HTC Touch HD against the brand spanking new HTC HD2 in an OpenGL stress test, and of course the result is predictable. Unfortunately the actual numbers are not legible in the video, but we have seen in the past that we can expect some pretty amazing results when we compare the Snapdragon device against the older generation devices.

More at Pocketpc.ch here.

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Microsoft job posting confirms Silverlight UI, OpenGL presence

October 25, 2009 | By Surur

Interpreting the Microsoft job posting tea leaves are always fun, and the latest one is pretty interesting.

The ad appears to be for Microsoft developers to create demonstration applications to give developers an idea of what the platform is capable of.

Product: Windows Mobile
Division: Entertainment & Devices Division

Do you dream about building cool iPhone applications that will make the current crop of applications look downright plain? Ever wonder what it means to deliver on the "Three Screens + the Cloud" vision? Are you confident that if you had the opportunity, you have what it takes to light up the next generation Windows Phone with breathtaking experiences that will delight our customers? Then why not bring your imagination, UX design and software development skills to the team building the first cool applications and user experiences for the next generation Windows Phone. While you design and develop your dream applications you will be defining the future of the phone by combining awesome user experiences with the ubiquity and scale of cloud computing. At the same time you will be working in a fun, fast paced and execution focussed environment.

We are a small team in Windows Mobile, developing compelling consumer applications that are entertaining, sticky and fun. We will ship these applications with our next generation Windows Phone. We are looking for an exceptional Senior Software Design Engineer who knows how to build experiences that will delight consumers on resource limited devices. We have a clear charter and a committed schedule that require agility, focus, commitment and team work. Our goals are equally clear – ship compelling applications and experiences that consumers will love while demonstrating the power, productivity and the ease of use of our application platform and tools to millions of developers.

Requirements:
Must have:
1 – 3 years experience developing and shipping software written in C# or C++
Demonstrated experience building and shipping compelling end user experiences with knowledge of one or more UI Frameworks (eg. Silverlight, WPF, Flash, XUL)
Good understanding of web standards, patterns and protocols (eg. HTML/CSS/XML/REST/SOAP/AJAX)

Nice to have:
Good understanding of graphics technologies like D3D and/or OpenGL
Knowledge of media streaming technologies
Working closely and communicating well with UI/UX Designers

Of note is insistence of Silverlight/Flash etc experience, confirming we believe that the Windows Mobile 7 UI (or at least applications on the platform) will be using this.

Of further note is the preference of OpenGL experience. There has been some debate whether OpenGL, which is of course a non-Microsoft technology, will be a requirement for Windows Mobile 7. The leaked Chassis 1 specification appear to require it, but we have not seen any confirmation anywhere else.

Read the full job posting here.

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opengl

Features

Requirements

Product: Windows Mobile Division: Entertainment & Devices Division

Product: Windows Mobile
Division: Entertainment & Devices Division