Palm to present at 2010 Game Developers Conference 29
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:59 am EST 
While Palm’s spiffy new PDK (Plug-in Development Kit) is right now limited to bringing fancy binary apps to webOS only from a few select developers, that isn’t going to stop Palm from showing it off to the masses. To that end, Palm will be presenting at this year’s Game Developers Conference. GDC will be taking place in March in San Francisco, just up the road from Palm’s Sunnyvale headquarters.
The hour-long presentation, scheduled for 3:00 pm on March 12, has a title that tells us pretty much everything we need to know: “An Overview to Creating Games with Palm's Plug-in Development Kit (PDK)”. But that’s not all, there’s also a description if that left you hungering for more:
“Come learn how to take full advantage of the advanced hardware capabilities of Palm's webOS devices--including full OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 support--using the recently announced Plug-in Development Kit (PDK). This technical session will provide an architectural overview of Palm's hardware and software platforms and then provide hands-on details for how the PDK exposes these capabilities.”
Which makes us say “Ooooooh.” Will we see new game announcements? Considering that they’re planning to demonstrate the PDK to game developers, we wouldn’t be surprised if the PDK becomes widely available around that same time.
Thanks to Baryn for the tip!
29 Comments
The game is on!
When World of Warcraft hits WebOS, I will officially ditch my computer. :D
wow nerd alert!
:D Its true.
Game ON!!
can't wait for a new version of the pre in sprint to start messing with games...i know the current one supports it..but i will preffer a bigger screen ...at the moment i will stick to my old classic games and my gameboy emulater...GREAT GOING PALM!!
I need to dig up a Nintendo emulator to play River City Ransom again. Fantastic game. And what better way to show it off to all my friends, then by playing it on my Pre. But I agree, a new device with a bigger screen (or how about just a new device that I haven't completely scratched up already?) would be nice for game playing. I definitely am excited about where this is heading.
I love all the games I seriously cannot stop playing lets golf. Sims is awesome as well. I can't wait for more games to hit the platform.
I have same problem. Lets Golf is addicting and killing my productivity!
I hope they show/explain to the developers how easy it is to port the games over to the WebOS platform.
wow there gona need a hell of a lot of games just to make this atleast intresting and now I see why they were holding out on the games so they could say look we now have games fuckin media hos
would someone explain what openGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 support exactly means? And how will webOS take advantage of it
OpenGL ES (from what I understand) is the mobile version of OpenGL, a Linux-based driver to take advantage of graphics hardware acceleration (akin to DirectX in Windows).
This kinda pisses me off. Apparently Palm isn't having any issues with gaming. Or maybe they just don't care about pre users that they will only show off games on the pre plus. well... best of luck to Palm.
They have screwed me and many other people over in the gaming area. I paid $10 for Need for speed Underground (when it's only $5 for iphone users) and I can't even play for more than 2 minutes without it even crashing and saying "The application NFSU has unexpectedly quit." Sometimes Glyder 2 won't even open. says, "You have too many cards open." when there are no cards open at all. I love Palm, and WebOS but I really wish there was a better way to get support or at least a refund on apps. As a customer I am feeling as if my troubles are being ignored as they shift focus to the pre plus for gaming.
doctor your phone and get on with your life.
Why would I need to doctor my phone if I don't have any patches or themes installed to mess with the phone in the first place?
Is doctoring even supported by Palm?
Being that you get the WebOS Doctor by downloading it from the support portion of palm.com, Yes. It is certainly supported.
If you have had your device through upgrades from 1.0.x on up, a Doctor is a good idea. It is a fresh install, which may clean up your issues.
Was dat a real question???.....
+1 on the doctoring there is nothing like a clean start
it feel so pure
LOL! No Doubt! Stop pissing and moaning! Better yet, it will probably work to reset your phone and then play your cpu intensive games. I've got NFSU and love it. I dont have any Homebrew patches or apps on my phone, it's still a virgin in that respect and I've ran NFSU until my battery went dead and had no freeze ups or whatever. And, you will tire of playing NFSU way before you run out of a full battery! The PreII will be out soon enough. I can wait now that my Pre is so damn cool! Give me flash and a video recorder and i think you would be hard pressed to find a phone that is this cool!!! The Pre II for sure will have 4g capability, 512 megabytes of RAM, a Snapdragon CPU or better, 16 gigs of useable storage, more impressive hardware(Palm, please do not lose the physical keyboard)plus all the goodies that we currently have. I don't give a damn about voice command. I had it years ago and cant honestly say that I miss it. It takes me a second or 2 to dial a number using speed dials, so i just don't get the hoopla about voice command. One feature, that would be cool is to have video phone capability....
For NFSU, I suggest two things:
1. delete the game, restart, reinstall, restart.
2. There might be a bug in NFSU, where if the music volume is set to zero the game crashes. Try setting the volume to at least one bar, see if it helps.
i have doctored my pre many times (in 1.3.5) and the problems the game still crashes before i even finish a race. Also tried to play with voolume up... same shit
Try restarting your phone once in a while. I don't know what could be wrong with your phone but the games obviously work on both revisions of the Pre. I personally would copy all my stuff from my USB drive on to your computer and use the WebOS Doctor. The download can be found http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/pre/recoverytool/deviceselector...
Restarting hasn't seemed to help.
Thanks for the link and for the advice. I'll give it a shot.
ooooh and yes the doctor is made by palm so why would it not be supported
Hm, I thought that they announced at CES that the PDK would go public around March, maybe March/April. Don't hold me to it, as I'm not feeling rigorous enough to find the reference in that video or in the PreCentral's live-blog... But if that's right, the GDC seems like the obvious and unsuprising place to announce that "it's now public."
...just supplying more support for the ending sentence in the article, "Considering that they
Quick question for anyone in the know...
Will the PDK assist in making the OS as whole more smooth? I know the hangup in the past has been no GPU support. The new 3D games, however, are smooth as butter and I would love to see the entire OS move that way. The app launcher, flicking between pages and cards, scrolling inside apps and the web browser...all that stuff, all crisp and smooth would be AWESOME!!!
Any knowledge would be greatly appreciated!
http://robbypayne.com
i would buy sim city or cities xl for pre! (pinching my pennies, thats y ill stay with sprint!) i'd also buy grand theft auto.. just incase rockstar and EA is reading :)
Oh man, GTA would be epic!
Can't wait for the day 3D games become commonplace on the webOS.