Windows RT

[Steel]

I hope I am posting this in the right section. Anyways, I would love to see TA Spring on a Windows RT tablet. I heard it is possible to port a game from Windows to a Windows RT.

[AF]

TA Spring? *cough cough*

Yes and no, it's significant work if it happens

Mainly as there is no OpenGL support in the Windows RT SDK. We'd need to make the renderer DirectX compatible ( a mammoth task in of itself ), or use OpenGL ES 2.0 coupled with one of the projects that translates it into directx9.

Suffice to say either option is unlikely to be the most performant.


Having done all of that, there'll need to be work done to the base underpinnings of the engine to make it run as a metro app rather than a windows app.

Then finally, we would have the engine running on Windows RT.

But that's not the end! Spring is an engine, that'll never get onto the windows store, so we need to distribute a game, not an engine. Lets say we picked Evo-rts, as it's already distributed on Desura etc

So we would have to distribute 'EvoRTS for Windows RT' and so on for each game developer joining the bandwagon. We'd need to pick which maps etc should be bundled, because the lobby isn't a part of the engine. We can't bundle springlobby or the ZK Lobby, those are separate programs ( which themselves need rebuilding into Metro ), no autodownloader in the engine either.

So now you've exerted all of this effort, and at last you have compiled and tested, submitted to Microsoft, and been approved. Many, many months, possibly years have passed, and you log into the lobby. Join a game, and launch.

hmmm it desyncs, let me try again

nope more desyncs.

Your stuck. You're unable to play with anybody save for other Windows RT users. There's a chance someone with the same ARM chipset is playing an android version against you and it has a slim chance that with some development effort it might sync, but that's remote, unlikely to happen etc...



Ironically the best way of doing this is not to use Spring at all, but rather to go talk to Spliff about his port, which would fundamentally change the engine in extreme ways.

[Das Bruce]

But that's not the end! Spring is an engine, that'll never get onto the windows store, so we need to distribute a game, not an engine. Lets say we picked Evo-rts, as it's already distributed on Desura etc

So we would have to distribute 'EvoRTS for Windows RT' and so on for each game developer joining the bandwagon. We'd need to pick which maps etc should be bundled, because the lobby isn't a part of the engine. We can't bundle springlobby or the ZK Lobby, those are separate programs ( which themselves need rebuilding into Metro ),

This is a good idea anyway.

[Forboding Angel]

But that's not the end! Spring is an engine, that'll never get onto the windows store, so we need to distribute a game, not an engine. Lets say we picked Evo-rts, as it's already distributed on Desura etc

So we would have to distribute 'EvoRTS for Windows RT' and so on for each game developer joining the bandwagon. We'd need to pick which maps etc should be bundled, because the lobby isn't a part of the engine. We can't bundle springlobby or the ZK Lobby, those are separate programs ( which themselves need rebuilding into Metro ),

This is a good idea anyway.

Agreed. That said, I have no plans to attempt to integrate into metro. That UI is a travesty and needs to die in a fire. This statement is of course unrelated to Windows RT.

But yeah, basically what AF said. If we had an army of developers sure it could be done, but we don't, so not likely.

[AF]

I estimate ~2 years if the devs drop everything they're currently doing and focus on a port. It's a much bigger task than the linux port.

[SpliFF]

i'm not convinced windows rt is a platform anyone wants. microsoft has always sucked at embedded systems and this one seems designed to fail.

[Funkencool]

So when I heard Windows 8 was supporting the ARM platform; is this what they were referring to? For shame M$