April 1st, 2008 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: J2me | 1 Comment »
Dutch developer Hooper has announced to release a new open source wrapping tool that takes Nokia builds to any mobile device.
“With Hooper, we hope to drive the mobile games industry forward. Device fragmentation has always been issue number one when we spoke to developers. Now, they only have to create one Nokia build, and they can take it just about anywhere as long as the screensize is right.” said Sven Veenstra, MD of Hooper BV. “By creating it as an open source model, developers can add new device specifications to the system themselves in order to expand it.
Don’t think that one build is enough though. As we read from the documentation, one build is needed per screensize. So in the end, you still need to develop a few builds, but the time and money needed for porting will be limited.
“We choose Nokia as the base build because Nokia has really been pioneering mobile games development. Also, it’s the biggest brand in the market. We want to respect that.” said Mark Koppels, marketing manager of Hooper BV.
Following a conference call we had with Veenstra, the Hooper tool is still far from finished. Though porting of J2me seems to stretch to most popular brands like Motorola, Samsung, LG, Sagem and SonyEricsson, the company is preparing a new version that also allows J2me build to be ported to native platforms like Symbian and the iPhone. Veenstra sgives no promises if that new version will also be open source and free for all.
More information about Hooper can be obtained from http://developer.hoopmygame.net.
As a Dutch company, and close releations to Hooper, we had the privilege to work with the early beta’s and so far we’ve been really impressed with Hooper’s solution to porting.
It simply does what it promises, and we can build our games for a lot more devices now.. recommended!