Roku Developer Program

[evilmax17]

I've heard in the past that the Netflix channel was not created with the publicly-available SDK, and that it has special private access to things that regular developers are not privy to.

I was just wondering if this was the same case with Rovio. Did they create the Roku version of Angry Birds by only using the publicly-available 3.0 SDK that we all use?

Thanks!

[scyber]

I'm pretty sure that most (if not all) of the original private-access features that the netflix channel uses did eventually make it into the public SDK. It is possible that some of what Rovio is doing may not be in the public SDK intially, but I'm pretty sure that Roku will eventually make it available.

[RokuKevin]

They will be using features not available in the current public SDK, although the v3.0 firmware does enable the development of 2D games. The Rovio announcement marks Roku's entry into the casual gaming space and we can't wait to see what other games are developed with the v3.0 2D APIs.

--Kevin

[cdoty]

What kind of performance can we expect from the 2D APIs?

Can it realistically draw an entire screen at 15 to 30 frames per second?

[Anonymous]

Please see this morning's developer blog post for more information about Angry Birds and gaming on Roku: http://blog.roku.com/developer/

[kbenson]

"cdoty" wrote:
What kind of performance can we expect from the 2D APIs?

Can it realistically draw an entire screen at 15 to 30 frames per second?

Yes, depending on the scene, and how willing you are to abuse the double buffering. You can actually achieve 60 fps.

There's a few things to consider with this though: regular and associative array element access is costly. Function calls are costly. Floating point is costly. It really depends on the application.

[jbrave]

So optimally it will be like game dev in BASIC on the old atari 400/800, (sprites and all) inline code without arrays, I knew all those years of writing games as a kid might eventually come in handy!

8-)

-Joel

[mbratch]

"jbrave" wrote:
So optimally it will be like game dev in BASIC on the old atari 400/800, (sprites and all) inline code without arrays, I knew all those years of writing games as a kid might eventually come in handy!

8-)

-Joel

lol... good one, Joel. 🙂

[cdoty]

Brightscript does feel a lot like the old 8 bit basics, just got to remember not to add a semicolon at the end of a line.

It's been pretty easy to pickup. Although, I'm dreading the syntax error half way into running the program.

[ryanxwalton]

"RokuPatrick" wrote:
Please see this morning's developer blog post for more information about Angry Birds and gaming on Roku: http://blog.roku.com/developer/

I was going to ask if playing Angry Birds or any other upcoming games will require new hardware, but your blog pretty much answered that question for me. 😄