Games for the Next Billion
Catchy title right? Don't worry, content partly matches to that description... ;) It seems that I quite often include videos in my blog posts. There is no reason to stray away from that habit now, so here's a video showing a beta version of "Smoke the Bugs!" game on N950 & N8: By looking at the graphics, effects, dynamic lights etc. what you saw was a pretty average OpenGL (ES 2.0) game, right? Well yes and no... Yes, GLSL shaders have been used for the effects. But no, there is zero lines of OpenGL and in fact also zero lines of C/C++ in the game. It's all QML + GLSL + JavaScript. To work on current Harmattan & Symbian devices, game uses Qt 4.7 with the shaders plugin. This is an okay-ish platform, as you see from the video: N8@680MHz runs at smooth ~60fps. But I have also smelled, tasted and floated in the sweet velvet of Qt5 and can tell you as a fact that it will be much better. With Qt5 & QtQuick 2.0, applications will get a healthy boost of perfo