29 January 2009

Paparazzi For S60 3rd Ed
Accelerometer Based Open Source Game

Paparazzi is another freeware title from Jouni Miettunen, developer of the Jontris, popular freeware "Tetris" like game for 3rd Edition of S60 devices.

Jouni Miettunen, is programmer and Python enthusiast and he became a Forum Nokia Champion, mainly thanks to his active participation in Python for S60 community.

The Paparazzi game is an open source project developed in Python.

Paparazzi is an experimental accelerometer based game, where you are trying help the famous "Movie Star" to avoid annoying "paparazzis" as long as possible.

Game uses Nokia N95’s accelerometer plug-in to control the game so it means that game is only compatible with 3rd edition, FP1 devices equipped with accelerometer sensor.

This is a minor update to the initial version. Actually the only thing I did was to add some graphics from http://www.famfamfam.com Unfortunately the free graphics is only 16x16 pixels, so the result is a bit smallish... Anyway, I was really impressed (myself) to see how big difference bad vs good graphics makes to an application.

Sorry, works only with PyS60 1.4.x runtime running in Sensor API supported devices - which basically means N95 and N82. If and when PyS60 1.9.2 is released with much wished Sensor Framework support, I'll take another look at this and see whether it needs some serious upgrade.

Mostly I'm thinking about stabilizing the sensor output - but have to see first what does Sensor Framework actually output, of course! said Jouni over at our forum section

In case you are owner of some of the FP2 devices like the Nokia N96 or N85 do yourself a favour and don't waste your time on downloading as it is not compatible with new sensor framework and you’ll not be able even to run it.

For Fellow Developers

This is an experiment how to use raw Sensor API data in game play. It's pretty usable - you don't have to turn your device 180 degrees to go from one side to another. However movement is too jumpy and would require smoothing down. There are several possibilities how to do that.