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BREW: 2.0 and Beyond BREW: The Story So Far2002 has been an exciting year in the arena of mobile gaming, especially here in the United States. Although Europe has been crowing about their superiority in the areas of 3G deployment, handset features, and business model development, the United States market for mobile gaming has shown signs of dramatic growth. Much of this activity can be attributed to the formal launch of Qualcomm's BREW by Verizon Wireless. Last year, BREW was merely yet another API in the mobile application platform wars. This year, we have seen BREW become a real way to generate revenue from wireless applications. Shortly after Verizon's trial run in San Diego, they announced at the BREW 2002 developer's conference an encouraging uptake in high-end handsets as well as application sales. Among the most popular applications were, of course, games. Now with a major marketing blitz on the horizon and a number of sleek new BREW handsets making their way to Verizon stores, we are about to see what the national market will think of BREW. BREW as a technology has evolved over the past year with the release of BREW 1.1 and 2.0. The API is usually a version or two ahead of the handsets with 1.1 devices just now coming to market. However, Qualcomm has taken developer suggestions to heart, and it shows in the many encouraging additions and changes with each new release. BREW 1.1BREW 1.1 is a relatively minor upgrade to BREW, with a few new features and API additions. One of the more important features for game developers is the addition of a stretchblt function. Now, it is possible to rescale device-native bitmaps to arbitrary sizes when drawing them to the screen. This may provide something of a solution for the myriad of different screen sizes on BREW devices, but the resolution and color-depth of the average handset probably makes stretching images a less than optimal solution. BREW 1.1 also introduced the Brew Compressed Image format. BCI files are compressed bitmaps-sort of an alternative to the PNG standard. That's not to say BREW does not support PNGs, BREW extensions that do just that are on the way. However, the BCI format is now native to the API, and an editing tool now comes with the SDK archive. It is also possible for a single BCI to include multiple images for animation and other effects. With many games, the majority of the application's size lies in the bitmaps embedded in the resource files. With BCIs, it is possible to dramatically reduce the precious space taken in the file system by images. As stated before, BREW 1.1 handsets are just now making their way to America. One of the first of these devices is the Motorola T720. This sleek handset sports a vibrant 12-bit (4096 color) TFT LCD screen with a resolution of 120x130 pixels in addition to impressive 40-note polyphonic MIDI capabilities. The T720 has as one of the largest memory capacities of any current BREW handset with 400k of RAM, a 4096 byte stack, and 1500k of file system space. This is quite a step up from the early BREW devices with a mere 60k of RAM and a 500 byte stack. BREW 2.0For game developers, BREW 2.0 brings a few much-needed features to the table. Perhaps most important is the inclusion of native sprite and tile support. BREW now allows developers to create high-speed tile scrolling engines using a variety of different-sized sprite and tile images (8x8, 16x16, 32x32, etc). Demos shown at BREW 2002 showed impressive performance using a Super Mario Brothers-style application. BREW 2.0 also introduces the concepts of transformations to bitmap objects. These transformations allow images to be rotated, scaled, and even flipped on the fly. These are applicable to normal bitmaps as well as sprite and tile objects. Currently there are limitations to the rotation and scaling (usually only allowing 90 degree increments and scaling by a power of 2), but the addition of image flipping is a real benefit for those of us carefully managing applet size and memory budgets. Now, it is simply a matter of dynamically flipping a sprite when you want it to face left instead of right. BREW 2.0's Device Independent Bitmap (DIB) interface now allows pixel-level access to images, including the handset's frame-buffer. This opens the door for powerful pixel screen effects, as well as other conveniences associated with accessing images at the pixel level. For instance, it is now possible to take the frame-buffer image and save it as a file. The first BREW 2.0 handsets are just now beginning to surface in South Korea, the world's most mature BREW market. Prototypes now exist from such OEMs as Hyundai, with actual retail models to follow soon. When we will see these in the United States is anybody's guess at the moment. ________________________________________________________ |
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Introduction
Resource
Guide 
