Android Development for Google TV

Hey guys,

If you don't know what Google TV is, here's a quick summary (and why I think it's important to game development)

Google TV is Google's latest attempt to own everything. It will be built into some new TVs and blueray players, and will also be available as a separate set-top box. It claims to seamlessly bring the internet to your television. Of course this isn't novel, but why I think it's important is because it is basically a new development platform. It will support Flash and Android Apps, so my immediate interest in it is casual game and app development. I imagine my mom playing Tetris during commercials An SDK is also supposed to be coming out soon which will hopefully open up the platform to a variety of different uses.

Once we get a better understanding of the input devices, I think game development will be very fun and possibly reach a large market of casual gamers.

Is anyone going to be developing for this platform? What kind of potential do you guys think this will have?

When I couldn't find a TV-centric development community I ended up setting one up myself just yesterday. If you plan on developing for Google TV, feel free to join the forums.

http://www.gtvconnection.com

 

developing for inexistant is something only companies with masses of cash for R&D experiments can do.
the rest of us waits until we have the SDK and optimally a device to see the performance in action, otherwise we would end as with android 1.x at worst: devices that crap slow that the iphone ran in circles around it even when throttled down

 

Except Google TV is using Android which is now proven (and in many cases superior to iOS).

I'm interested in the development of some casual games for Google TV... it's a great market, glad to see you set up a forum, I'll see you there

 

I'm not talking about making games now (however, a head start isn't a bad thing) just the future prospects, and wondering if anyone's thinking about it. It was expected to be released this fall with the Android market opening up sometime next year.

We do already have knowledge about the hardware and I don't think performance for casual gaming will be much of an issue. However beyond casual games i wouldn't expect much.

 

Does not mean that the hardware is reasonable especially if it is put onto any kind of player not just dedicated ones with at least tegra2 level for example.

BR players in general are not all that powerfull at all, the ps3 is the exception.

[OT]The superiority is a taste thing. If apple wouldn't ask for too much cash and have such a limited amount of options (contract lock in various countries), I wouldn't be willing to bet that the android sale through rate would have been anywhere close to what it is
In the USA it additionally suffers from its ACrap Crap hardbinding[/OT]

 

True enough, some specs as to what hardware we're looking at would be awesome. But I wouldn't mind starting a small project in spare time that would be aimed at Google TV, even if it doesn't work out, it would be fun.

 

Hightlights taken from Intel's website:

At it's core is an Intel Atom CE4100 running at up to 1.2ghz with 512k second-level cache.

Graphics:
Programmable 2D/3D Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 500 running at 200MHz

Dual universal scalable shader engines with up to 16 threads per core, providing pixel and vertex shader functionality.

Decoding 2 1080p video streams at the same time

Audio:

24-bit 192khz 7.1 channel output

 

So basically an ipad then with an even more overdriven screensize than already punishes the ipad and iphone4 ... great (thats irony)

cause Intel GMA 500 = SGX535 = iphone 3GS - iPad - iPhone4 GPU


and at worst that might be a "higher end one" ...

on the other hand, it also solves one thing, cause unity applications will not run on that box at all, atom is x86, unity android builds are native kit builds and thus ARM (not Java)

 

Good point. But I imagine this will be taken care of next year in one way or another.

Given Unity and Google's recent cooperation:

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/05/19/google-android-and-the-future-of-games-on-the-web/

It sounds like Unity will soon be able to run natively in Chrome without a plugin install. So there is that route.

The other route I see is eventual adaption of hardware or software. There's the large possibility of Google TV adopting an ARM processor next year. And there's the eventual updates to NDK that may trickle down into a future version of Unity.

From Google's website:


Q. Can I use the Android NDK to write apps for Google TV?
A. The Android NDK will be available for Google TV at a future date.

and

Future releases of the NDK will also support:

* x86 instructions


Either way I would put money that Unity will break into this market sometime next year

 

Hi,

I wanted to know if there is a way to embed mono into an app built by unity so that it may run on a device which does not support Android NDK (Google TV etc.) ??

Also please take a look at this

 

Is there any updates on that topic?

We want to develop Unity applications for TV... but is there a convenient way to do it?