Java ME vs. Flash Lite: A comparison of mobile phone game development

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Java ME vs. Flash LiteA comparison of mobile
phone game development

• Alex Koller
• Supervisors Greg Foster, Madeleine
  Wright

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Overview of Presentation

1. Project Synopsis
2. Research Findings
3. Demonstration
4. Results
5. Conclusions
6. Future of MobileGame Development
7. Questions?

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Project Synopsis

• Comparison of mobile game development between
  Java ME and Flash Lite 2.1
• We investigated the available APIs
• Understanding capabilities of each platform
• Designed and developed a cross platform game
  designed to test the capabilities of Java ME and
  Flash Lite

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Project Synopsis Cont.

• Developing a complete game allowed us to
• Test all aspects of game development
• Test supporting functions, such as persistent
  data storage, menu creation, etc.
• Assemble quantitative comparison results

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Research Findings

• Game types and genres
• 3D games becoming more viable phones with
  increased processing power and onboard GPU
• Simple and addictive game play over graphics
• Simple user controls
• Arcade-style games are well suited, and have been
  successful on mobile phones

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Research Findings Cont.

• Important features of a successful arcade-style
  mobile game
• Decent speed/frames per second
• Minimal memory usage
• Quick return on investment short development
  time
• Small file size for transfer and storage
• Addictive, easy to play and fun!
• Immerse the player in the game

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Research Findings Cont.

• Development Environments
• Java ME
• Many development environments to chose from
• Sun Wireless Toolkit excellent free choice
• Comes with many utilities for emulating, testing,
  method profiling, memory monitoring, etc.
• Flash Lite
• Flash CS3 Professional is the only option
• Propriety software (US600)
• Crashed multiple times while developing, emulator
  occasionally refused to run

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Research Findings Cont.

• Development Environments Compared
• Average of five successive start-ups
• Initial memory usage immediately after
  start-up
• Development Time
• Roughly three weeks for each platform

Development Environment Start-Up Time (seconds) Memory Usage (mb)
Netbeans 25.6 121
Eclipse 13.2 67
IntelliJ IDEA 24.6 140
Java Wireless Toolkit 3.4 33
Flash CS3 Professional 20.4 89
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Demonstration

• Black Sky is a top-down perspective,
  arcade-style, tile-based game
• Both implementations are almost identical

Black Sky (Java ME)
Black Sky (Flash Lite)
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Results

• Frames Per Second
• Average FPS over 30 second period
• Java ME 22.91
• Flash Lite 19.75
• Memory Usage
• Peak memory usage over one minute period
• Java ME 516 kb
• Flash Lite 1032 kb
• Java ME peaks when initialising, while Flash Lite
  continues to rise, peaking at the end.

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Results Cont.

• Lines of Code
• Java ME more complete than Flash Lite version
• Java ME 3000 lines
• Flash Lite 1000 lines
• Final file size
• Most mobile phone games aim for 200kb
• Java ME 81.5 kb
• Flash Lite 59.3 kb

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Results Cont.

• Problems Encountered
• Java ME
• Creating GUIs required some trial and error can
  only be created programmatically
• Flash Lite
• Flash CS3 does not natively support MIDI
  requires a laborious 10 step workaround
• Difficulty creating a tile-based game engine
  without BitmapData object (introduced in Flash 8)
• Input validation (button presses) too slow for
  fast-paced games results in unresponsive
  controls

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Conclusions

• Both Java ME and Flash Lite are capable mobile
  game development platforms
• Java ME is more mature than Flash Lite
• Java ME has been in use for many years
• Flash Lite is a relatively new platform
• Java ME has more variety in development
  environments

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Conclusions Cont.

• The game we created allowed us to perform
  comprehensive testing on both platforms
• Memory usage and frames per second
• Java ME outperformed Flash Lite in these two
  vital tests
• Number of lines of code and final file size
• Flash Lite achieved better results
• Java ME is better than Flash Lite
• For almost all aspects of mobile game
  development, we found Java ME enabled us to
  achieve our goals more precisely and easily

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Future of Mobile Game Dev.

• Java ME
• Solid development being made on the Java ME
  framework, specifically the gaming APIs
• Over 1 million developers currently using Java ME
• Flash Lite
• Flash Lite 3.0 recently released
• Focus is on video/multimedia, not game
  development
• Based on Flash 8 (still no BitmapData object
  though)
• At this stage, Java ME is staying ahead of Flash
  Lite in terms of mobile game development

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Questions?