If you don’t know what Google TV is, here’s a quick summary (and why I think it’s important to game development)
Google TV is Google’s latest attempt to own everything. It will be built into some new TVs and blueray players, and will also be available as a separate set-top box. It claims to seamlessly bring the internet to your television. Of course this isn’t novel, but why I think it’s important is because it is basically a new development platform. It will support Flash and Android Apps, so my immediate interest in it is casual game and app development. I imagine my mom playing Tetris during commercials An SDK is also supposed to be coming out soon which will hopefully open up the platform to a variety of different uses.
Once we get a better understanding of the input devices, I think game development will be very fun and possibly reach a large market of casual gamers.
Is anyone going to be developing for this platform? What kind of potential do you guys think this will have?
When I couldn’t find a TV-centric development community I ended up setting one up myself just yesterday. If you plan on developing for Google TV, feel free to join the forums.
developing for inexistant is something only companies with masses of cash for R&D experiments can do.
the rest of us waits until we have the SDK and optimally a device to see the performance in action, otherwise we would end as with android 1.x at worst: devices that crap slow that the iphone ran in circles around it even when throttled down
I’m not talking about making games now (however, a head start isn’t a bad thing) just the future prospects, and wondering if anyone’s thinking about it. It was expected to be released this fall with the Android market opening up sometime next year.
We do already have knowledge about the hardware and I don’t think performance for casual gaming will be much of an issue. However beyond casual games i wouldn’t expect much.
Does not mean that the hardware is reasonable especially if it is put onto any kind of player not just dedicated ones with at least tegra2 level for example.
BR players in general are not all that powerfull at all, the ps3 is the exception.
[OT]The superiority is a taste thing. If apple wouldn’t ask for too much cash and have such a limited amount of options (contract lock in various countries), I wouldn’t be willing to bet that the android sale through rate would have been anywhere close to what it is
In the USA it additionally suffers from its ACrap Crap hardbinding[/OT]
True enough, some specs as to what hardware we’re looking at would be awesome. But I wouldn’t mind starting a small project in spare time that would be aimed at Google TV, even if it doesn’t work out, it would be fun.
on the other hand, it also solves one thing, cause unity applications will not run on that box at all, atom is x86, unity android builds are native kit builds and thus ARM (not Java)
It sounds like Unity will soon be able to run natively in Chrome without a plugin install. So there is that route.
The other route I see is eventual adaption of hardware or software. There’s the large possibility of Google TV adopting an ARM processor next year. And there’s the eventual updates to NDK that may trickle down into a future version of Unity.
From Google’s website:
Q. Can I use the Android NDK to write apps for Google TV? A. The Android NDK will be available for Google TV at a future date. and Future releases of the NDK will also support: * x86 instructions
Either way I would put money that Unity will break into this market sometime next year
I wanted to know if there is a way to embed mono into an app built by unity so that it may run on a device which does not support Android NDK (Google TV etc.) ??
An SDK is also supposed to be coming out soon which will hopefully open up the platform to a variety of different uses.