GDC: Hardware Accelerated 3D Games on the N-Gage Platform
In a talk this afternoon, Nokia’s Peter Lykke Nielsen — with an assist from the guys at Digital Legends Entertainment — showed interested game developers how the OpenGL ES 1.1 standard will be incorporated into the N-Gage Software Development Kit (SDK) in the near future. Nielsen is the product manager of the N-Gage SDK.
As many of our more technical-savvy readers already know, a number of N-Gage compatible devices that are also OpenGL ES 1.1 compliant are already in the market. The good news is that Nokia plans to offer hardware-acceleration of select N-Gage games going forward, as well as a software rendered version for those devices that lack hardware acceleration.
The bad news is that I can’t tell you which games will feature 3D hardware support or when they will be available. But considering we were shown a sweet-looking demo of ONE running under OpenGL and that the Digital Legends team gave an overview of their experience developing, one can probably draw one’s own conclusions about at least one game. 
* For more detailed information on creating games for N-Gage, visit http://developer.n-gage.com/.
