Mobile OS support

[Caydr]

I apologize in advance if someone else has already reached this conclusion and I'm just being a sad caricature of myself again.

Before I leave on my self-imposed ban I wanted to say that, having now owned an Android handset (Desire w/ Cyanogenmod 6) and seen some of the potential, my opinion of the timeline for potential to port Spring to mobile devices has completely changed.

Earlier I said that they don't have the CPU, GPU, battery life, storage, input precision, or screen size to support an enjoyable RTS experience but this is clearly no longer the case. I'd have probably realized this sooner, but here in Canada where our telecom companies charge us 70 cents a minute to send smoke signals, I hadn't until recently had the opportunity to try a modern device.

The Nexus One and other models of its generation (Desire, Droid 2, Droid X, etc), in my estimation, could most certainly handle a somewhat stripped-down version of Spring with units of TA-like detail.

Maximum map size, texture size, poly count, etc, would all have to be limited of course, but not as badly as you might think judging from some of the highly impressive games and applications that are available.

With the newly-released Galaxy S/iPhone 4 generation of devices, you can see how fast progress is coming, and it's really staggering. Within 6 months I'd estimate there will be enough proliferation of high-end Androids and iPhone 4s that not only will there be potential for Spring to be a huge success, but every day that goes by when we aren't working in that direction is a terrible waste.

I'm guessing that still only a few of our developers have tried an Android handset since they're so new and only available in limited areas, but I can't recommend them enough. You really should give one a look and see the potential for yourself.

There's probably already been an Android port for 8 months or something, so again, I apologize. I've had a lot of stuff going on at home and at work, and Spring is one of the things I've had to cut out of my life for the time being until stuff gets more manageable again.

[raaar]

disclaimer:
i never owned such kinds of devices (only googled them).

here goes:

imo some of spring's problems come from lack of dev time put into mods and engine. You want people to lose time tweaking down appearance of mods so they can play a relatively slow paced rts on a mobile device?

Will anyone realistically play spring on a train?(maybe with a laptop) or a bus? heck! maybe walking down the street, with some pauses when crossing.

Earlier I said that they don't have the CPU, GPU, battery life, storage, input precision, or screen size to support an enjoyable RTS experience but this is clearly no longer the case.

Maybe they'll get there quickly on storage and processing power, but not on input precision and screen size, not to mention the context where they are useful (otherwise people can play using laptop or desktop).

Within 6 months I'd estimate there will be enough proliferation of high-end Androids and iPhone 4s that not only will there be potential for Spring to be a huge success, but every day that goes by when we aren't working in that direction is a terrible waste.

there is already a bigger proliferation of desktops and laptops capable of running spring better and...guess what...the number of players isn't booming.

[smoth]

I don't think this is a serious post. Spring requires pretty high hardware to run. Even running something like *A on a mobile would be pushing it.

[knorke]

I don't think this is a serious post. Spring requires pretty high hardware to run. Even running something like *A on a mobile would be pushing it.

Didndt you read, in 6 months there will be enough proliferation of high-end Androids and iPhone 4s that not only will there be potential for Spring to be a huge success, but every day that goes by when we aren't working in that direction is a terrible waste!!!

[aegis]

a reduced subset of spring can run on very limited hardware (specifically, ARM + powerVR).

if we cut out some things like map deformation, redo UI, reduce memory usage, change rendering to be compliant with opengl es... we can get spring running on arm devices.
it would actually be rather usable on a 7-10" tablet running iOS or android.

it's not going to sync with x86 spring, and I'm not sure how much work would be needed to make different arm devices sync with each other.

it would also be a reasonably large porting project.

[SpliFF]

I see this being useful for spectating. Touch input would probably make it difficult to play.

Spring has potential to run on these devices with some tweaking of Spring graphics engine to support OpenGL ES (essentially disabling a lot of shaders and providing fallbacks to minimal core GL). Making Spring run on low-end notebooks and PDAs has been discussed before though, it's a nice idea but it will take time and commitment to get right.

[smoth]

I just don't see it being done with any real unit count or unit complexity. Are you guys running on super low settings or something? What is your fps? most of the time mine is 60.

[SinbadEV]

anyone who can't afford/doesn't want to buy an android phone can install one of the platform emulators available through the SDK's package.
http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

I was doing so this evening anyway because I was bored and wanted to see if a pair of bluetooth enabled virtual reality goggles could be used as an interface for an android smart phone.

... but then I accidentally signed up for and installed second life because VR goggles capable of overlaying data into my perspective without the metaverse is incomplete...

edit: just to be clear... I don't actually have the aforementioned goggles... nor have I been able to determine if they exist.

edit2: Also, I'd like to mention that when I said "VR goggles capable of overlaying data into my perspective" I was trying to think of the term "Augmented Reality"

[aegis]

spliff, it will not sync with x86.

I had a concept for an app where a PC ran the simulation and forwarded things like unit positions and projectiles to a tablet in realtime over the network - this would make for a usable spectator platform but not require much cpu power on the tablet side.

depending on latency you could even use the tablet as another control interface (awesome minimap anyone?)


another reason I want luasockets (right now the cleanest way afaik is to use lualobby as a proxy for a socket)

[smoth]

would a cellular phone be able to handle a map though? or all the game textural assets? I mean maps are pretty huge man.

[aegis]

remember smaller screen means less detail on the screen and potentially less memory used by said content

[Argh]

And you could use a half-resolution map, or smaller, with a double-resolution pathfinder, etc., and give things a huge performance boost. That, plus a game design and content that was well-optimized is probably doable.

I think the issue there is that all of this sounds like work, and without funding to pay for it, there's no way to make it happen in a timeframe that matters, because portables are a moving target and what's going to be available in a year will probably be subject to Moore's Law moreso than PC engines are.

[AF]

A unit limit of 400-500, TA polycount units, no 3d camera ( and all the optimisations that come with it ), nondeformable ground, specialised water shader, custom UI, and some compromises regarding things like projectiles and collisions detection, and your ready to run fluid framerates and have room to spare.

We already have command and conquer, the settlers, and other OTA era RTS games running fine on iPads and still underusing the performance potential, and to be fair ANY game will draw the battery simply because its doing more than rendering text.

My thoughts are that the main obstacles are these:

• Manpower
  Who will build this?
• GUI
  We would need support for touch APIs in lua
• Concept
  A spring app in the app store/market would be nonsensical. A BA app would never make it, but an Evorts app would work, and a kernel panic app would work. Theyd make us more visible, whereas a generic spring app faces the danger of failing guidelines and being rejected for being too vague, or failing because of all the extra hoops in game acquisition it would incur

[smoth]

Then it would cease to be spring. Personally I think this would be a waste of time. Why branch the engine and strip it down to a shite engine? what would be the point? There are many other better professional engines out there.

[hoijui]

if we have good enough phones in 6 months for a very cut down version of spring, we will have phones running current spring fine in 12 months. stripping spring down there would take more then 12 months.
problem solved.

[smoth]

This is also true.

[Teutooni]

Have you actually tried TA era RTS' on a 3.5" touchscreen? Even if it ran fine, the interface originally designed for mouse and keyboard combination, and screen size 5 times larger would need to be completely redesigned. Units, buttons, everything would need to be relatively large to be usable on a tiny touchscreen. I just don't see any sense in TA-like complex RTS with huge scale on such a device...

[smoth]

I concur, I have cnc for my iphone and it is laughably uninteresting in terms of scale. you are dealing with extremely limited screen space

[AF]

Command and conquer always had poor scale even at 30" screen proportions because they let you zoom not so you can see more of the game, but so you can marvel at the greebles.

RTS on an iPad or something of a similar size is perfectly feasible. I would still like to see many of the necessary optimisations in the engine such as simplified collision, e.g. weapons that are guaranteed to hit and take no account of terrain or unit diameter beyond calculating if they are within range of the firing unit ala dawn of war I. Things that help simplify the simulation for lower overhead at a cost of realism if one chose.

[smoth]

Wrong it'd small scale was part necessity and part gameplay.

Even still with the current engine you are talking a major branch. You would have to largely gouge out the engine.

As far as iPad, we are talking celular phones
.