The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release => General UQM Discussion => Topic started by: grima on February 02, 2004, 02:39:06 am



Title: Palm Version
Post by: grima on February 02, 2004, 02:39:06 am
What about a Palm Control ver?  ;D
It would be so great !!!  :D


Title: Re: Palm Version
Post by: Nic. on February 02, 2004, 05:31:21 am
That's a great idea!  Let us know when you've got a finished version ready for us to test.


Title: Re: Palm Version
Post by: Deep-Jiffa on February 02, 2004, 06:39:33 am
Quote
That's a great idea!  Let us know when you've got a finished version ready for us to test.


Your first messege I see which you do nothing but complaining! Wow!

edit: forgot  ;D


Title: Re: Palm Version
Post by: youBastrd on February 02, 2004, 10:28:25 am
Apparently Timewarp works on ARM processors, popular in mobile devices.  Ask away in the TW forum to get details on how to get started.  (I don't know the details myself). http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~timewarp/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi

If it turns out that there's enough interest, maybe we'll get some better documentation/research/work for getting TW to get along with mobile devices.  


Title: Re: Palm Version
Post by: Michael Martin on February 02, 2004, 12:49:45 pm
Seing as how we don't even have working versions for Windows and Linux yet, ports elsewhere are somewhat unlikely unless porters both volunteer and stick around.  (For example, Nic here handles most of the OS X end of things.)

Now for the actual answer:

We of the core team are programming to the Simple Directmedia Layer.  This lets us use the same graphics, sound, and input code across all three of the platforms I named, and quite a few others besides.  From the SDL website (http://www.libsdl.org/):
Quote
Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Windows, BeOS, MacOS Classic, MacOS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, IRIX, and QNX. There is also code, but no official support, for Windows CE, AmigaOS, Dreamcast, Atari, NetBSD, AIX, OSF/Tru64, and SymbianOS.

Please note the lack of "PalmOS" on that list.  Any Palm port would have to reimplement most of the stuff in the src/sc2code/libs tree.

(Also note that due to the fact that SDL is incomplete on MacOS Classic, UQM won't run there.  This may change in time, but don't hold your breath.)

[Edit: Grammar fixes, some clarifications]


Title: Re: Palm Version
Post by: FalconMWC on February 02, 2004, 07:50:44 pm
So a palm version of UQM is 95/100 not going to happen. Correct?  


Title: Re: Palm Version
Post by: Culture20 on February 02, 2004, 09:38:40 pm
Quote
Apparently Timewarp works on ARM processors, popular in mobile devices.  Ask away in the TW forum to get details on how to get started.  (I don't know the details myself). http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~timewarp/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi

If it turns out that there's enough interest, maybe we'll get some better documentation/research/work for getting TW to get along with mobile devices.  

Naughty naughty, youBastrd!  Getting people's hopes up.  Assuming you've seen the videos, you know that it's slow as a dog at the moment.  ARMs don't have floating point co-processors, and TW uses lots of floating points...  
Also, most of the Palm devices use motorolla or TI processors at far less than 206MHz that the intel chips generally run at.

If you're curious about ARM status for UQM, it will probably get posted in the technical forum when I can look at it again (UQM uses far fewer floating points, and I think I might know the problem, but not how to fix it yet):
http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Techissues;action=display;num=1063303287


You might be able to pull off the trick that I used once to play UQM on an iPaq:  I transfered an X(video) session from one computer over a wireless connection onto my iPaq's screen.  If you connected to a Unix-style OS with your Palm using some version of ssh, you could have the textSDL library render the SDL as text images, then transfer them through your terminal session.  I personally think it would be utterly unenjoyable though.


Title: Re: Palm Version
Post by: Richard on September 20, 2005, 10:55:05 am
http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~timewarp/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi
Unfortunately the above link is now dead.

You know, come to think of it, a port to a PDA- or cellphone- type device is just what SCII needs to get back into mainstream.  A game of this caliber would really kick the butts of all the other games available for those devices, and the graphics/sophistication level would be on par with expectations for such devices.

Palm's new Treo650 has a 320x320 screen and a 344MHz processor.  I think the latter is even some sort of Intel CPU.  So I think we've surpassed specs of the original PC's that SCII was played on!  (Heck, I used to play it on a Pentium 60MHz).  I wonder if anyone's made a PC-emulator for PalmOS.....


Title: Re: Palm Version
Post by: Novus on September 20, 2005, 11:15:54 am
Crikey, what a severe case of thread necromancy!

UQM is a very complex beast and hard to port. Getting it to run as a 64-bit Linux program on an Athlon 64 PC already causes problems; trying to port it to a PDA with an exotic architecture, limited standard library and so on will probably be quite painful. You'd also have to deal with the limitations of the machine's interface, which could require some restructuring of the UI, trickery to compensate for low screen resolutions and so on.

I'd forget about playing UQM with a stylus, but a cellphone's numeric keypad should be enough. You don't need text entry for anything important in UQM anyway, so the input aspect shouldn't be much of a problem. After all, the 3DO didn't have many buttons, did it?


Title: Re: Palm Version
Post by: rk on September 20, 2005, 11:22:49 am
To add to my previous post in this thread...   Apparently Palm OS6 is going implement OpenGL, and I also hear rumours about some sort of SDL support!  http://www.answers.com/topic/superwaba reports a Palm SDL port already in existence.  This is all just the result of some quick Internet searches, sorry if its more hype than fact.

-Richard


Title: Re: Palm Version
Post by: Kaiser II on September 20, 2005, 07:43:13 pm
After all, the 3DO didn't have many buttons, did it?
The 3DO controller had three standard buttons (A, B and C), a left and a right shoulder trigger button, pause and play buttons (start and select on most controllers), and the D-Pad.

If you count the D-Pad as four buttons, there were a total of 11 buttons on the controller.


Title: Re: Palm Version
Post by: Arcadae on November 22, 2005, 09:56:13 am
11 buttons?  Sounds like it would work perfectly on the Tapwave Zodiac.  The d-pad is available, as are left and right shoulder buttons.  Four buttons plus the function button total 11, and there's even the home button that could be used to exit the game quickly.  :)