Workflow
Airplay allows you to manage the development of mobile games and applications from the creation of artwork to the final deployment on device. It supports and assists all stages of development and supplies major cost savings at every stage along the way.
Click any of the above images for more information on the various workflow stages.
Create: Airplay™ Reduces Art Development Costs
Airplay massively reduces art development costs by providing a "Scalable Content Pipeline" which supports hardware-accelerated OpenGL ES 1.1 as well as a best-in-class software renderer. Fragmentation persists not only for the native OS but also for the graphics capabilities of the device. Hardware acceleration can generally be addressed through OpenGL ES drivers; however, OpenGL ES is not a good choice for pure software rendering, and typically developers are required to develop their own software renderer if they want to achieve any kind of interactivity on low-end devices. Airplay Studio solves the graphics fragmentation problem by providing complete end-to-end tools and a runtime art pipeline, which seamlessly addresses low-end pure software rendering devices, high-end hardware-accelerated devices, and all capabilities inbetween. The runtime provides a graphics API abstraction layer which seamlessly supports software rendering and any other graphics APIs the device may provide. It includes a heavily-optimised software renderer (over 6 years in development) which is widely considered to be the best-performing software renderer in mobile gaming today.
Scalable Content Pipeline
The term "Scalable Content Pipeline" is coined to sum up the following features and efficiencies provided by Airplay Studio:
- Export models, animations and materials from 3ds Max or Maya.
- Target software rendering and OpenGL ES 1.1 from a single set of art assets.
- Target software rendering and OpenGL ES 1.1 from a single set of render code.
- Gracefully down-scale high-end art assets as required for software rendering.
- Load-balance between CPU and GPU, according to the maturity of the GPU and drivers.
Experience has taught developers at Ideaworks Labs that OpenGL ES drivers are a critical component when trying to maximise graphics performance. Just because a GPU driver is compliant with the OpenGL ES specification, it doesn't mean that all the API calls are actually accelerated by the GPU. We found that, to ensure maximum performance across all flavours of device, there are 3 stages of the pipeline which need to be switchable between the OpenGL ES drivers and an optimised software solution: transform, lighting and rasterisation. Airplay Studio uniquely provides this flexibility, therefore providing optimal graphics performance across all devices from a single application binary.
Develop: Airplay™ Cuts Development Time and Cost
Airplay massively reduces code development cost by allowing the entire mobile application to be developed on the desktop using one SDK. Developing for multiple native operating systems is currently a painful process. The programmer typically has to:
- Obtain and install the target OS SDK for each flavour of each OS.
- Learn the coding paradigms, core APIs, restrictions and eccentricities of each OS.
This adds up to an extremely cumbersome, time-consuming and costly exercise.
One Powerful, Versatile SDK
Airplay System removes every one of these restrictions. It abstracts developers completely from the technical details of the native operating systems, and even from operating systems' proprietary SDKs. The developer does not need to install any OS SDKs in order to develop games or applications for those platforms. The developer's task is made much simpler as only one API needs to be mastered. This means developers are not required to waste time in conforming or getting to know the subtleties of a number of very different APIs, thus saving a huge amount of time in the development process.
All from Your Desktop
As one of the supported native operating systems is Windows, 95% of game development can be carried out within a familiar desktop environment. Currently the recommended IDE is Visual C++ (VC6, VC .NET 2003 and VC 2005 are all supported) as this is widely considered to be the most advanced and efficient development environment available and most developers are already very familiar with it.
Test & Debug: Airplay™ Reduces Debugging Costs
Airplay massively reduces code debugging cost by providing full source-level debugging of the native ARM binary all on the desktop. Debugging by frequently testing code on device is a very definite and serious process bottleneck. This is usually carried out without any form of on-device debugging, and thus results in a glacial process of writing trace statements to text files, etc. The Windows implementation of your application created using Airplay is designed to model as closely as possible all aspects of the target devices, and to raise the majority of device-specific issues within the IDE. For example, screen size, available heap memory, available stack memory, portrait or landscape display, CPU/GPU load balancing of graphics pipeline and many more parameters can all be configured and respected within the Windows implementation. This means you can avoid the bottleneck of frequent on-device tests.
Integrated ARM Emulation
Airplay allows you to avoid using proprietary OS simulators to test code. These are nearly always very slow to boot up, and are still running x86 code, so are not able to detect a whole host of issues which may only be evident when compiling for ARM. Airplay System includes a real-time ARM emulator that allows execution of the single ARM binary within an ARM debugger, which accompanies the SDK. This uniquely provides the ability to test and debug the exact code that will be run on a device within a desktop environment, and results in a huge increase in productivity compared to using on-device debugging.
There are certain use cases which necessitate the testing of your application within the simulator provided by the native target platform SDK (e.g., the BREW or Symbian simulators), which may be required by certain platforms for their certification process (e.g., True BREW Testing). For these cases, the solution seamlessly integrates with each of the simulators so that a developer can very easily test and debug their application in this way from within the development environment.
Deploy: Airplay™ Reduces Deployment Costs
Airplay is designed to eliminate any overlap between development and deployment. It does this by spliting the production and post-production process; the Airplay Development and Deployment environments are completely separate, ensuring that game developers can concentrate on developing games, and deployment producers can concentrate on deploying the game, resulting in much higher productivity.
Additional Platform Support
Games and applications created using the Airplay SDK are "Future-proof". Airplay's combination of single binary and OS abstraction layer mean support for additional platforms and handsets can to be added and applications that have already completed development can be deployed to these new platforms or handsets without the need to rebuild. How is this possible? Once the additional platform support has been added, an updated version of the solution is paired with the new deployment target, i.e., palform or device. From this point forward any differences in platform or device are understood and resolved by the updated OS abstraction layer. This means the single game binary can remain unchanged, and games that have already been completed and verified to correctly use the platform abstraction APIs can trivially be packaged for the new platform in the deployment environment with no input from the game development team and thus with negligible deployment cost. Support for additional platforms is added by the Ideaworks Labs team responsible for implementing the platform abstraction APIs. These engineers are experts in the wide range of issues related to working with new platforms, and with all the subtleties involved in ensuring compliant behaviour.
Certification Process
Ideaworks Labs maintains a formal process for "certifying" handsets as being supported by the solution. This process involves running a large set of unit tests, followed by system testing in the form of testing our already released titles. Any required device profile changes or workarounds can then be made and tested. Once this is complete, an updated SDK is released with official support for the handset. In practice however, for a platform that has a relatively mature (>5 devices certified) implementation, the handsets usually can be certified without modification or at the least require data driven changes rather than code changes to Airplay System. Given that the device profile script can be edited by users of the SDK, in these cases, deployment to new handsets can take place independently of Ideaworks Labs.