Talk With Marmalade
GDC, San Francisco—We talked with Marmalade about their cross platform development tools. Their single binary architecture allows for easy deployment for multiple end platform development.
Starting from a C++ development environment with focus on Arm-based platforms allows them to target a large range of OS and devices. One key factor is that Arm is one of their investors, and most mobile devices use Arm architectures for their main processor. The only problem is that the various Arm-based platforms are highly fragmented across OS and screen sizes.
They can easily integrate 3rd party engines into the tool and have a virtual studio for evaluation of effects. They support many aspects of gaming, especially video segments. The single code base is optimized for all platforms and the virtual tools take no more than 50K of memory.
They have unified development on a unified set of devices and most development is on a desktop machine. The applications binaries are run on a simulator for most of the development, which allows for incorporation of existing IDEs and the host of existing tools and libraries. For mobile platforms, the final integration steps have to be on the end device, due to the many variants and form factors.
The development environment takes advantage of the networks and interconnects on top of the device , and the OS and drivers in that stack. Many functions run under the embedded version of OpenGL-es. Their SDK is Marmalade studio, which has an API and extension development kit. They are working with many partners in both hardware and software, and support an Apps program for their users to help them get into the Apple and Android Stores.
In the future, they will provide further support for Windows, OSx, and other major operating systems. They are looking towards doing more work with the smart TV manufacturers and their apps stores. Other ongoing projects include HTML 5 and CSS3, which provide a native UI for many more types of apps.
Users can get more information and download their SDK at http://www.madewithmarmalade.com/
