Gaming on Laptops

Have you ever played an engrossing game on your laptop? Have you ever had the laptop battery warning annoy you when you are in the middle of the most exciting part of the game? Have you thought about providing laptop specific features to your gamers?

If the answers to any of these questions are in the affirmative, then read on. Game developers and avid gamers are increasingly moving to laptops as the platform of choice for gaming. But some of the behaviour of laptops versus desktops tend to hinder the immersive quality of gameplay. The need is for games to adjust automatically to resource-constrained mobile environments. Using the Laptop Gaming TDK released by Intel, your games can integrate mobile features that meet user expectations for computing anytime and anywhere. For starters, some of the mobility features that might add more value to your game when played on a laptop are:

• Monitor and manage connectivity. Users can be given real-time feedback on the strength of their mobile connections and could potentially have games scale down to adjust to changes in the connectivity.
• Effectively balance power and performance. Users can get the most from available battery life.
• Adapt game states to platform state changes. Games could behave differently by monitoring the load on the platform including the load on each core of a multi-core platform.

Developers face significant challenges when integrating or extending mobile features in games that are aware of platform context and resources in order to efficiently take advantage of mobile platforms. Let us analyze some of the ways in which you can handle each of these mobility aspects. When you are playing a game in full-screen mode, you do not get to see the power meter shown in the windows taskbar, neither do you find the wireless signal strength. It would be really helpful when you are playing the game to watch the battery consumption, so that you can save your game before you run out of battery. If you are playing a networked multiplayer game, having the wireless signal meter shown in the game, would indicate when you are losing signal strength and save the game or move into a single player mode.

While the above mentioned features provide direct impact on the gamer, there are other changes that the game developers can do to their game that can have an indirect impact on the user experience. For example, the game can auto-detect platform power changes and can automatically scale down/up the features like AI, graphics and physics. When the laptop enters into a battery state from ac power state, the game can compromise some aesthetics like particle systems for waterfalls or dust simulation for increased game play time.

Creating code that is aware of platform context means your games can more efficiently adapt to user settings as well as environmental and platform changes. For example, a gamer in the middle of a multiplayer networked game, could be transitioned into a single player mode with game states saved when the wireless network strength goes down. A power meter and wireless connectivity meter on the game HUD could give the gamer continuous feedback about the platform state of the laptop.

As we continue to see miniature versions of full-fledged PCs with the advent of the Ultra Mobile PCs, gaming is expected to be a key usage model on such devices. As the devices become smaller, there is an increased need to be power and mobilie aware. By starting to make your games laptop-aware you will remove some of the issues related to power and mobile awareness and you can be ready for the next generation of mobile platforms.

Intel Laptop Gaming TDK

The Intel Laptop Gaming TDK provides a single API layer to access most of the key platform states that are relevant to gaming on laptops. Field studies based on mod development for some popular games have shown that it is extremely fast and simple to integrate the TDK into existing game code. The TDK provides threaded and non-threaded APIs to give the game developers the flexibility to enhance their games for performance and control. The product is being provided as a free download to enable game developers to provide their customers with extremely useful mobile features for better immersion on laptops. The TDK can be downloaded from the Intel Software Network.

References

Mobile Gaming Developer's Guide

Game Design for UMPCs

Additional Resources

Intel Software Network Mobile Developer Community is a hub for developer information related to all things mobile, including technical documentation, SDKs, forums, knowledgebases, and blogs. http://www.intel.com/software/mobile.

Click here to Post your query on Intel’s Laptop Gaming TDK

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