Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NYSE: TXN) and Ideaworks3D are extending the capabilities of the OMAP™ Gaming Platform to support the OpenKODE® 1.0 specification, addressing a wider market targeting feature phones to high-end multimedia handsets. This platform will be one of the first in the industry to incorporate the OpenKODE Khronos Open Development Environment to further simplify the development and deployment of new games across multiple mobile phone segments, creating a larger market opportunity for game publishers.

To enable developers to address the broadest possible market, the gaming platform has been expanded to include TI’s OMAP 2 and OMAP-Vox™ product families. Additionally, the offering spans both accelerated and non-accelerated 3D graphics solutions using a common development and deployment environment through Ideaworks3D’s Airplay™ software.

The Ideaworks3D Airplay SDK is optimized to take advantage of TI’s OMAP2430 and OMAPV1030 processor capabilities, while maintaining cross-platform portability. The SDK on TI’s OMAP2430 processor takes advantage of hardware-enabled 3D graphics to provide a premium gaming experience. The Airplay SDK on TI’s OMAPV1030 processor utilizes software graphics renderers to enable compelling casual games for the feature phone market.  Both platforms exceed the performance guidelines being defined in a mobile gaming white paper currently under development by the Open Mobile Alliance™ Games Services working group.  The platform will scale to support future standards such as OpenGL® ES 2.0 with TI’s OMAP 3 product family. 

“Game developers will see dramatic reductions in development costs by utilizing the TI and Ideaworks3D gaming platform,” said Alex Caccia, CEO, Ideaworks3D. “We have found that game developers can achieve up to 60 percent cost savings for development and porting of mobile games using Airplay SDK on TI’s OMAP and OMAP-Vox platforms.” 

One of the most significant benefits of the TI and Ideaworks3D solution is that it changes the current mobile gaming development process by allowing developers to create one game binary which runs on leading open operating systems, including Symbian OS™, Linux^® and Microsoft^® Windows Mobile^®.  This enables the same code to run on a range of handsets with performance on par with other native applications. 

“Support for open standards including OpenKODE, OpenGL ES and the OMA mobile gaming white paper is important to advance the development of mobile games,” said Avner Goren, marketing director of Texas Instruments Cellular Systems Solutions. “We view these open standards as vital to the success of the mobile gaming market and TI will continue to enhance the mobile gaming platform with Ideaworks3D to help developers quickly deliver new and compelling games to market.”

For handset manufacturers and operators there are distinct benefits to using the combined TI and Ideaworks3D gaming platform. This includes a reduction in porting costs and development time, as well as enabling the development of higher quality games that can be used on a broader range of handsets. Due to the portability benefits of the gaming platform, handset manufacturers can instantly tap into a larger catalog of mobile games by integrating the Airplay SDK into their products, rather than porting and validating games on each new handset. For operators, the Airplay SDK allows premium native games to be delivered to handsets using their existing Java-based content delivery platforms.  The robust security mechanisms provided by TI’s M-Shield™ technology ensures that platform security is maintained when installing premium native games.

At the Game Developers Conference, March 5-8, TI and Ideaworks3D demonstrated the scalability of the Airplay SDK on TI’s OMAP 2 and OMAP-Vox platforms in the Khronos booth 160 WH, 260 WH.

Sourced From: Corporate Voice|Weber Shandwick