iPad

[Painted Lady]

Do you guys have any plans to port the game to the iPad? It strikes me that it a wonderful platform for DCSS......

[MyOtheHedgeFox]

Without a keyboard, playing it would be wa-a-ay hard without a major interface overhaul.
By the way, does the game license allow the game to be published for iPad?

[XrBob]

I think it's possible to have some sort of soft keyboard on screen, though a real keyboard is always preferable. I don't have an ipad, though if I was on a long trip and I could play crawl that'd be cool, but then at that point why wouldn't I just use a laptop?

[galehar]

The game is quite playable with just a mouse. A touchscreen interface shouldn't be too hard to do. I'm not sure about the port however. I'm not sure I want to deal with apple's crap. Don't I have to pay steve to get the SDK? Anyway, if I ever find the time to try to port crawl, I'll start with android. Besides, I don't even own an iPad.

The game is licensed under GPL. I don't see what could prevent an iOS port, but then, I haven't read the EULA.

[Astarotte]

Seems like GPL (at least GPLv2) is incompatible with th Apple ToS. Search "apple vlan" and you'll see what I mean.

[Kate]

I vaguely remember someone mentioning in IRC that Crawl would violate Apple terms and conditions of some description because of allowing clientside Lua stuff. Not certain about it, though.

[Bim]

Yeah I helped out on a GPL thing a while ago and Apple were absolutely awful about it, with cease and desists and legal threats left right and centre, without really explaining how stuff was violating their terms and conditions. Completely put me off Apple for life (although I already wasn't a fan). You can say whatever you want about winblows, but its a hell of a lot better than Apple if you want to do anything constructive.

I'd also say that crawl, although playable with the mouse, is a bit fiddly at the best of times and so I imagine it would need a lot of work to make it usable for touch screen. If you really want to run crawl though you could getting windows up on an Ipad using some VM stuff, I know its possible, but I have no idea of the limitations and how usable it is, but I'm sure you could get something working if you really wanted.

Or just get a proper tablet.

[joellercoaster]

I'm not sure I want to deal with apple's crap.

This.

I'm not a Crawl developer (nor do I play one on TV), but I am a longtime developer - and I would rather bite off my own leg than do it in the Kafkaesque nightmare that is iOS.

[edit: This is not a judgement on its technical merits - iOS seems to be in the "not awful" camp on that score - just purely on a licensing, publishing and dealing-with-bullshit-unrelated-to-actual-coding level.]