iOS support

[stevedekorte]

Has anyone ported Spring to iOS?
Is it already designed for OpenGL ES?

[Forboding Angel]

Sure, when the iphone gets a 3ghz processor and 8gb spare memory we'll get right on that.

In the meantime, you might think about how in the hell you would manage to control the game on a tiny 3.5inch screen.

[AF]

The iPhones main limit would be RAM. If you can fit spring into the RAM limits, then you'd have plenty enough screen resolution, processing power, and storage to play.

The main issue is GUI. How would you actually play spring on a 5" touchscreen.

Also we wouldn't be able to put 'spring' in the app store. We might be able to put BAR or Zero-K, or evo, but not the engine on its own, it would just be rejected and there's no mechanism for droppping game content into the appropriate folders ( and any integration of Rapid would probably be rejected anyway ).

Then there's the other UI problem, what about starting and launching games? There's no competent UI on the desktop nevermind a touch version, it's all lobbys and other external programs.

Then there's the search button, clearly it wasn't pressed else you wouldn't have started this thread =p

There's nothing stopping you from trying to build this though. There's an OS X build of spring, a port using touch APIs, I'm sure you can get an iOS build working given time

[gajop]

the only silly thing about this is that he's talking about iOS instead of android!
there's even a touchscreen project here - that's what you use

[AF]

The touch screen project relies on a pen, it would need further UI work to allow fingers only, and further work ontop of that to scale it to a 10" screen nevermind an iPhone or a 5" Android device

[Forboding Angel]

At least with android you have phones with beefy hardware and decent size screens.

iPhone has a 3.5 inch screen and an 800mhz processor, which is laughable compared to the hardware in decent android phones.

Hell, even the original evo4g had a 1ghz processor (which you could reliably overclock to 1.4ghz), a 4.3 inch screen and hardware that blew the iphone 4s out of the water before it even existed.

Anyway, if you expect full fledged rts games to be playable on a phone, you're out of your mind.

I have an s3 which has a 4.8 screen and I can't imagine the fail that would be playing evo on a screen so tiny. You would need at the very smallest a 10 inch screen and even then it would be extremely cramped. Not to mention that touchscreen controls for RTS games are far slower than traditional kb and mouse inputs.

Touch input is a nice gimmick and looks cool in advertisements (RUSE), but in actual practice, it would suck giant horse dong.

[PicassoCT]

two evil words drop by: complexity reduction.. take away everything from spring that eats ram.. big maps.. too many units..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyL5jzKR55M


so basically you need a diffrent gamedesign approach there.. something like kivis dune. With a hub-structured like base.

[gajop]

1ghz processor (which you could reliably overclock to 1.4ghz)

I think RISC has lower clock speed than CISC in general, but tends to be faster at the same speed. Probably could play some smaller games on a newer android, or iphone. I just think of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKq_3uhRiZg whenever I want to imagine smartphone capabilities.

[AF]

At least with android you have phones with beefy hardware and decent size screens.

iPhone has a 3.5 inch screen and an 800mhz processor, which is laughable compared to the hardware in decent android phones.

Hell, even the original evo4g had a 1ghz processor (which you could reliably overclock to 1.4ghz), a 4.3 inch screen and hardware that blew the iphone 4s out of the water before it even existed.

Anyway, if you expect full fledged rts games to be playable on a phone, you're out of your mind.

I have an s3 which has a 4.8 screen and I can't imagine the fail that would be playing evo on a screen so tiny. You would need at the very smallest a 10 inch screen and even then it would be extremely cramped. Not to mention that touchscreen controls for RTS games are far slower than traditional kb and mouse inputs.

Touch input is a nice gimmick and looks cool in advertisements (RUSE), but in actual practice, it would suck giant horse dong.

Lets take these claims for a moment and see the logical outcomes of the assumptions made:

• Faster clock speeds in phones are a good thing
• More gigahertz == more performance
• All processing and rendering on a phone is done on the CPU
• The size of a screen and resolution is irrelevant for performance, only the usability matters
• iOS is only found on iPhones and there is no such thing as the iPad
• Android Tablets have yet to be invented yet

All of which is utter tosh.

I would like to see your evo4G at 1.4Ghz outperform a core i7 underclocked to 1.4Ghz. I'd also like to see it stay turned on from 100% charge and survive a game of spring without draining entirely.

Also you'll be surprised to find out that phones have GPUs too. You'll be even more surprised to find out that your evo 4G doesn't have the same processor as the iPhone, and that's not just Apples changes. You're literally comparing apples and pears. Different base chip design, different manufacturers, different fab scales, different goals in design.

You'll also be happy to know that the iPhone cpu also overclocks too, actually, 95% of Android phones do it, as do most other phones, and it's not because the phone is good, it's intentional. Fewer Ghz == More battery life & longer shelf life. I think you'll find almost every single phone that can be bought has been underclocked intentionally by the manufacturer, some phones when upgraded just get a higher clockspeed rather than a new CPU.

Modern smartphones are not paltry things, they do many things faster than the average desktop at the same or higher resolutions. They have a tremendous amount of processing power for their size. The GPU in an iPhone 3GS trounces most intel integrated GPUs by orders of magnitude. Sure they don't compare to a Geforce 550, but current state of the art phone tech is just arriving at PS3 class graphics horsepower.

There is enough graphics and process horsepower and screen resolution on modern smartphones and tablets to run spring. The problem is:

• There isn't a lot of RAM, RAM drains battery and it's relatively expensive for phones so it's not supplied in abundance.
• UI, even with a big enough screen you'd need to design a touch based UI. When you have an effective 24" touch based UI that doesn't rely on pens and cursors, come back and we'll talk about scaling it down to 10"

And that's all assuming he wants fullblown spring. He may be happy with a limited version e.g. unit caps of 250 and a head down orthographic view ( doesn't save much processing on it's own but it lets you make assumptions that can boost performance )

[PicassoCT]

I always thought, that "porting" a game to a smart phone means remaking it from scratch. The memory managment is diffrent, you need way more asssembler optimization by hand, and on and on it goes.. were it stops..

[AF]

I always thought, that "porting" a game to a smart phone means remaking it from scratch. The memory managment is diffrent, you need way more asssembler optimization by hand, and on and on it goes.. were it stops..

For the old Nokias and pre-iPhone devices yes, with maybe one or two exceptions.

Post iPhone it's all full C++/ObjC/Java/OpenGL ES with no compromises like lack of exception support on the CPU etc.. Though optimisation will always be involve when targeting a particular device

[Funkencool]

And it all depends how you look at it. Android is just an os, optimized to be mobile, running on an ARM processor. I have run a full distro of Ubuntu on my 1 ghz Nook Color and the only reason it sucked was complete lack of drivers.

But some things to be hopeful for
-Nvidias tegra platform and support there of (this and this)
-the minimum amount of RAM to get official ICS or JB (android 4.0 and 4.1) is already 1 gb
-Windows 8 will fully support ARM (cant be a bad thing)
-more general support for ARM architecture
-Moore's law (why not, I don't believe "smartphones" are a fad they're here to stay and they're only going to get better)<-click link

still for there to ever be a legitimate port anytime in the near future spring would need better MT support for it to take advantage of most (if not all) of the mobile processors.

[PicassoCT]

i actually think those google glasses will replace the plastic bricks we whoreship today..

[SinbadEV]

i actually think those google glasses will replace the plastic bricks we whoreship today..

Yeah... but not within the next year or so... black bricks are basically just hitting their peak right now... full on Head-Mounted Augmented Reality 3D is still in the "we have the technology but we don't have the consumer product" phase

My guess is Christmas 2015, something with Head-Mounted AR3D will be #1 on everyone's list.

[AF]

I doubt full blown visor goggles for VR will be popular for the same reason people feel weird talking to their computer or walking along with hands free sets or talking into the microphone on iPhone earphones.

Not to mention the problems with motion sickness thanks to the small lag between head movement and onscreen movement, or the weight of these things for prolonged use.

Google glasses transparent overlays will be the name of the game for quite a while, and nope, spring won't be running on those, maybe using them as an external screen, but you can already use an iPad or an iPhone to do that.

[Jools]

Some people played Total Annihilation with 64 Mb memory.

[FLOZi]

Some people played Total Annihilation with 64 Mb memory.

The extremely rich people. I played it with 16Mb.

[smoth]

The extremely rich people. I played it with 16Mb.

more than I had

[AF]

4MB Trident Graphics card ftw

[Pxtl]

Spring's synchronization logic is *strongly* related to the X86 architecture. iOS, Android, even the new Win8RT are designed for the ARM architecture.

Basically, the problem isn't the heavy lifting of Spring, but the processor itself that it's being executed upon.