Hey, i have there an idear. Maby it could be possible to bring Spring for the palm pre? That woulb be great. (Sauerbraten is possible for iPhone, so why not?)
I agree that right not it wouldn't be a valuable use of time, as standards are emerging and disappearing quickly.
Two years ago, Android wasn't on anyone's radar, a year ago Palm was tanking, and six months ago the Iphone had virtual 100% dominance on "app" developers' minds. Now we have Snapdragon CPUs, in the near future we'll have Tegra 2 GPUs. A year from now, tablets might be the big thing.
Any one of the above has major development implications.
However, down the road we might have (more) mods/games that don't rely on the idea of using hundreds of units, gigantic maps, and complex UI. Flash memory and RAM prices are also in a constant freefall.
The problem here is that the simulation of the game itself is too much for mobile devices, never mind cheap computers. If you could overclock the cpus on these machines you could probably run the simulation given a few quick fixes, such as removing realtime projectile collisions and 100% hit accuracy, and not bothering to properly detect where collisions occur, as well as removing the raycasting on LOS calc so we would have artefacts such as placing a unit next to a giant wall and seeing on the other side, etc etc
The problem here is that the simulation of the game itself is too much for mobile devices, never mind cheap computers. If you could overclock the cpus on these machines you could probably run the simulation given a few quick fixes, such as removing realtime projectile collisions and 100% hit accuracy, and not bothering to properly detect where collisions occur, as well as removing the raycasting on LOS calc so we would have artefacts such as placing a unit next to a giant wall and seeing on the other side, etc etc
easier to install sc1.
hmm...I bet even Starcraft 2 will be much less demanding than Spring.
Don't underestimate low power processors TOO much. My netbook, with a gig of ram, a 1.6 ghz Atom N270, and an Intel holy-crap-this-can't-even-legally-be-called-integrated-graphics-can-it? ran Spring surprisingly well. Like, playable surprisingly well. The only issue was that absolutely anything at all that used a graphic effect dropped my FPS to a slideshow because of the aforementioned poorly-named integrated graphics.
A 1.6ghz Atom is roughly on par with a 900mhz/1ghz celeron, which is x86. x86 however, from what I understand is very inefficient compared to Arm architectures. Sort of like how Linux is efficient compared to Windows, because Windows is expected to do and run everything under the sun without anything too terribly horrible happening.
So, a 1+ ghz "snapdragon"-like CPU coupled with a Tegra 2... that's what we have basically right now at this moment. Tegra 2 is just around the corner. RAM is cheap and will be expected in larger and larger amounts as mobile multitasking becomes not a luxury but a necessity.
A year from now, a version of Spring specifically tweaked to avoid taxing the CPU as much as possible might actually be doable. I'd be more concerned about things besides performance tbh. First, these phones are often only rated for like 10 hours of music listening. That's completely wrong and shows how sadly out of touch I am, but it's not very good. Watching a video would be much worse. Playing a complex RTS simulation, possibly over wi-fi or even a (awesomeness) 3G/4G cell connection? I don't know if you'd even last long enough to commbomb someone pretending to be Smoth tbh. And then, possibly an even bigger issue is just controlling the game... camera movement, build menus, unit selection and movement, selection groups, familiar keyboard shortcuts, etc... we rely on all of these things being 100% simple and intuitive, even a multitouch screen is only going to take you so far. Most phone manufacturers consider keyboards to be an ultra high-end feature...
I dunno, give it 2 years. Maybe by then we'll be able to play it on something more suitable though, like a Pandora handheld. Or, since the Pandora manufailers have managed to allow their handheld to become obsolete before the first one's even assembled, perhaps a Pandora 2 with up-to-date specs.