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Just out of interest because i think games are unbelievable creations, (and i even mean that one ping or pong here hehe!)
How is it that i can have games on my mobile phone of eg 465kb that i know would or should be at least 2meg say on a PC?
Also anybody got any good links on modern games development process just for reading material.
I think you mean that a PC needs 2GB to handle high-end games.
Mobile phones have much smaller memory footprint than PC's, largely because the graphics is much lower resolution. It also tends to be that the PC games have more levels and/or more complex scenes.
Consider that a 320 x 240 (1L x 1H) display takes a quarter of a 640 x 480 VGA (2L x 2h) screen, and most games are probably best played at 1280 x 1024 (4L x 4.25H), so 17x larger.
A bigger 3D scene will (be able to) contain more 3D objects, so it will take more memory (and code) simply to handle/control those objects. Each object consists of a bitmap (texture map) and a vertex list to describe the shape of the object.
Phone games are nearly always written in Java, so the runtime environment is expected to be on the phone. PC games are more "self-reliant", so most of the runtime environment will be shipped as part of the game.
Finally, there is "needs must". None of us are able to upgrade the amount of memory in the phone, and being an embedded device, running out of memory "is not an option". So the memory footprint of the mobile phone game MUST fit in the available memory in a mobile phone. These often have something like 4-64MB of RAM - far from all of that is available to the game, since the phone still has to operate as a phone and calender as well. So if the game is too large, it won't work on certain phones, reducing the market. The same obviously applies to PC games, but it's much more likely that someone will upgrade the amount of RAM in a PC to be able to get the latest game running than they are to get a new phone to play a new game.
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Mats
that makes sense to me yes, but my original example was referring to the file size, eg downloading a 2D sidescrolling/platform like one o the tomb raider titles on mobile phones. this download is, i dunno, 756kb, but i am pretty certain that the same game or something of similar level on PC would be a couple of meg file size, thats what the confusion was.
Yes, this is almost certainly a direct relationship between the "expected screen resolution" and "images held in the file".
Note that 320 x 240 is something you find in the HIGH end phones, and many have displays in the range of 100 x 200 pixels or so.
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Mats
Since the Java runtime environment handles graphics and input you may be able to make your pong game in less than 1K. Thats small ;)
whoa! a 1K game. A veritable NanoGame! i could write an army of them and have them hidden in the drinks of all the world leaders at G8 summit,...then the world would be mineeee!!!