Manhattan Story Mashup

The latest Forum Nokia Pro newsletter included an announcement about the Manhattan Story Mashup, an urban storytelling game, where players will run around Manhattan with Nokia N80 cameraphones, taking photos that illustrate words in stories written by other players. The play happens on September 23rd, and sounds like fun!

The game was organized by the Nokia Research SensorPlanet project, which explores “large-scale wireless sensor networks”. The game was designed by Ville Tulos, a researcher at Helsinki University, and Jürgen Scheible, Forum Nokia Champion and huge proponent of Python for S60. Ville wrote the Python client that is at the heart of the game software. The client consists of 1100 lines of code, and communicates with a Python server using a JSON protocol.

I wrote to Ville to find out more about the code. He responded: “I felt that the client should look & feel like an entertaining game. So I implemented a custom set of widgets on top of the [PyS60] canvas object, which was straightforward using immediate mode graphics (took a weekend).

“I had implemented an alternative camera extension already before, which provides a viewfinder (amazingly you can implement a really smooth viewfinder even though every frame is processed on the Python side). Having a live viewfinder within the client is crucial for game immersion, otherwise you would need to switch between apps all the time. In addition I have a thin wrapper for JPEG de/encoding, which is missing from the mainline Pys60 currently.”

Ville was happy with the whole Python development experience on S60: “The process of creating the client has been a prime example of rapid (and cheap) application development, made possible by Pys60. We have been able to iterate through different designs (the current one is the third version), improving usability during each cycle. However I have spent only some 2-3 weeks implementing the client in total. Almost like magic.”

Ville promised more information about his Python extensions after the Mashup is over. I’m particularly interested to hear how (and if) he used any of the native S60 API’s to create his custom extensions.

-Oren