News:

Do you need help?
Simutrans Wiki Manual can help you to play and extend Simutrans. In 9 languages.

Simutrans goes to iPad

Started by TheMachineguy, December 31, 2010, 04:03:35 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

TheMachineguy

I recently look around the app store to look for a good game, until I came across the simutrans app by ZodTTD. I installed it and it worked fine, but I noticed the screen was the size of an iphone and there was only one pak (pakHajo) and I don't know how to use the controls except for looking around which is double finger touch and drag. I need to know more controls and how to operate simutrans in an iPad, can anybody help me with this situation, thank you.





-TheMachineguy

Post sent via iPad.

sdog

This raises several questions. Firstly is the artistic license compatible with the app store? There are quite a lot of concerns in the Free Software Foundation (FSF) about incompatibility of the GPL with the app store (link). The Artistic License however is usually less demanding on further use.

What i read before there were some conflicts with ZodTTD where he was considered violating the licenses of free software  by allegedly keeping the key parts of his developments closed. I do not know how much is to this. His port of openTTD was taken off the app store, because of licensing concerns by the openTTD devs. It is not clear to me to what degree this is due to general GPL app store incompatibility or actions by ZodTTD.

One final question, are you completely sure it is simutrans and not openTTD you found on the app store? I haven't seen anything related to simutrans on ZodTTD's homepage.

Lmallet

Quote from: sdog on December 31, 2010, 05:19:03 AM
One final question, are you completely sure it is simutrans and not openTTD you found on the app store? I haven't seen anything related to simutrans on ZodTTD's homepage.

Actually, ZodTTD has been on this forum, and Prissi was helping him out:
http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=1601.0


As for the original question, ZodTTD managed to get Simutrans working on the iPhone, but he was only around for a few days, and never seen again.  I am surprised it is still in the AppStore, since my understanding is that the project was never completed (and was never officially supported by the dev team).

prissi

He made a simplified version of SDL and ported several applications to the iPhone. If there would be a native Quartz interface to MAC, such porting and automatic screen recognition would work much better; but there is nothing done yet.

Ashley

Quote from: prissi on December 31, 2010, 07:54:58 PM
He made a simplified version of SDL and ported several applications to the iPhone. If there would be a native Quartz interface to MAC, such porting and automatic screen recognition would work much better; but there is nothing done yet.

What would be involved in setting up a native Quartz interface for the mac platform?
Use Firefox? Interested in IPv6? Try SixOrNot the IPv6 status indicator for Firefox.
Why not try playing Simutrans online? See the Game Servers board for details.

prissi

Writing a simsys_mac.cc which uses the native functions for the stuff now in simsys_d.cc or simsys_s.cc or simsys_w16.cc. Maybe starting from simsys_posix.cc is also a good idea, since there nothing is implemented but the smallest denominator. All the graphics need to be added then.

(Maybe this needs also another objective C file with the actual code?)

KathleenJL

So is the app still available on the app store?

VS

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simutrans/id307349664?mt=8

I think this speaks for itself...
Quote from: Lmallet on December 31, 2010, 06:08:06 AM
As for the original question, ZodTTD managed to get Simutrans working on the iPhone, but he was only around for a few days, and never seen again.

My projects... Tools for messing with Simutrans graphics. Graphic archive - templates and some other stuff for painters. Development logs for most recent information on what is going on. And of course pak128!

Ashley

#8
Quote from: prissi on January 13, 2011, 11:27:44 AM
Writing a simsys_mac.cc which uses the native functions for the stuff now in simsys_d.cc or simsys_s.cc or simsys_w16.cc. Maybe starting from simsys_posix.cc is also a good idea, since there nothing is implemented but the smallest denominator. All the graphics need to be added then.

(Maybe this needs also another objective C file with the actual code?)

It looks like an objective C Cocoa wrapper would be needed to set up the graphics context, then drawing to that using Quartz. Once the native drawing functions were there switching the wrapper to Cocoa Touch would give you iOS capabilities too (and then all the gesture stuff would need to be thought about...)

Really interesting project if I had time...


Edit: The main problem is that Cocoa apps pretty much need to use the native Cocoa mainloop to properly handle the OS-facing bits. This means running the game in another thread, and then doing the rendering to screen in the Cocoa thread. I'm working on an implementation of this.

That takes care of the rendering anyway, events and the rest are still to be solved... Probably best to implement a queue of simutrans-type events and push new events onto the queue from the main event handler in Cocoa (when they occur), then the GetEvents()/GetEventsNoWait() methods can simply grab an event from this queue.

I've implemented this as a new simsys backend (quartz). I'll post some code when I get it working...
Use Firefox? Interested in IPv6? Try SixOrNot the IPv6 status indicator for Firefox.
Why not try playing Simutrans online? See the Game Servers board for details.