Saturday, December 22, 2012

Porting Android games to Blackberry 10/Playbook

It's really not so easy to find a game engine that will work on Android and Blackberry Android virtual machine since Blackberry doesn't supports native code and GLES2.

Here is a few game engines that I tested so far:

Doesn't works because uses native code:
LibGDX
Rokon
e3roid
ZenGL a really easy Pascal game engine for Android. 
Flixel-Android ... old version without libGDX libraries may work.
ORX Engine
Gideros Mobile - didn't tested yet,but saw in Blackberry forums that nobody successfully ported any game with this engine yet. And I believe it uses libGDX too.
LGame aka Loon-Simple engine.
AndEngine the latest version use GLES2. The older version may work just fine,but for now I just successfully compiled the library. The examples I downloaded uses native code. There is already few games ported to Blackberry with this library so I will investigate into it later on.

Can successfully export BAR file,but doesn't works on Blackberry 10 simulator
ANGLE and easy to use engine,compiles just fine, but can't get any graphics on screen.
LGame 0.2.8S game example seems to work and it shows about 60 FPS. You will find the older version and example on the project download page. After a while I am getting message that app is not responding and I can't shoot any bullets due huge lag. 
Works really fast on Android phone.
PapayaGameSDK - didn't tested since couldn't compile any APK. It's really interesting engine with a ActionScript like programming interface.

Seems to work:

Candroid - an canvas game engine. Seems to work after removing alerts box in examples,but couldn't play a example Duck Hunt style game smoothly and after a while I got exception about not responding application. Probably it's so slow because uses software rendered instead of GPU and GLES1. 
To compile the examples with Eclipse you will need  a Subversion plugin and when you select File -> Import -> Checkout from SVN as URL type a 
http://candroidengine.googlecode.com/svn/ 
And Eclipse will automatically find a Android project.

For now I don't have any game engine for a smooth games development. 

3 comments:

Rohit Verma said...

Hey,
Great post, extremely helpful!
So did you find any engine that works smoothly yet?

Regards

Gintas said...

The best solution is using Cocos2D-X since it has a port for Android and Blackberry. Also older AndEngine with GLES1 should work just find. I gave up using Blackberry extension for Eclipse since performance on emulator is horrible.

I ended up using Adobe AIR since it works on Android tablets,iPads and desktop.

Mark Steve said...

Here i take the information about games of Android. This post is very helpful to understand the process of porting Android games with blackberry.
iOS Event App