Making an IPad App?

[Blutrausch]

Hello fellow dungeon crawlers! I recently acquired an iPad, and was mortified when I could not find any good rogulikes such as crawl on the App Store. Thus I wondered whether those who play crawl would like an iPad app??? I also realized that we could use this to raise awareness for the games, and offer an easy way for people to donate. I unfortunately have no IOS coding experience, so this will be a learning experience for me. If you think this is a good idea or have any more suggestions please post and let me know, and if you would like to help let me now as well, shoot me an email at: benjamin.g.t.lewis@gmail.com

[njvack]

It'd be nontrivial. I don't think Crawl would be super well-suited to a tablet; having a keyboard really helps even in tiles. I do know there's been an android port, though I don't know if it's maintained.

There are good iOS roguelikes (868-HACK, Hoplite, and Arcane Tower are some examples) but the ones I've seen that work well tend to be a lot smaller than things like Crawl or Nethack.

[neil]

Unfortunately, Apple's app store terms are not compatible with the GPL, and with 200+ contributors all keeping their own copyrights, granting an exception is next to impossible at this point. It would be possible to make an iOS app, but only those with developer accounts or rooted devices would be able to install it

If you wanted to do it anyway, SDL does supposedly support iOS.

You could get around both of these problems by instead making tweaks to webtiles to work better with tablet-style devices and/or writing a front-end that connects to a webtiles server. Then the front-end could have whatever license. Someone did something similar for Android: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=16733

[njvack]

How are the store terms not compatible with the GPL? There's nothing saying you can't drop your xcode project on github; someone with a developer account just needs to build and sign and submit it to the app store.

At least, unless I'm totally mistaken?

[neil]

How are the store terms not compatible with the GPL? There's nothing saying you can't drop your xcode project on github; someone with a developer account just needs to build and sign and submit it to the app store.

At least, unless I'm totally mistaken?

The FSF has an article explaining the issue: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/mor ... nforcement . Essentially, the app store terms for users say you agree not to make more than five copies, etc, etc.; Apple doesn't allow individual apps to waive those terms; and the GPL does not allow such additional conditions to be imposed. So any past or present Crawl contributor could insist that Apple remove it from the App Store as a license violation.

[chequers]

I wonder if any would do so with an otherwise-open-source app though...

Anyway, if the license issue is too scary, you can do what someone did for Android recently and stick a webview to online tiles in an app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... dcssonline

[snow]

the main limitation is the keyboard
though that could probably just be replaced with an alternate interface
i.e. one button in the corner that lists all your items and skills

[njvack]

Huh, ain't that some crazy shit. Looks like GPLv2 is totally verboten on the app store. I love the license, but it's frustrating that distributing the source isn't enough, when that's what the spirit of the license is about.

[duvessa]

I love the license, but it's frustrating that distributing the source isn't enough, when that's what the spirit of the license is about.

It's really not.

[njvack]

... go on ...?

[bel]

There's this whole philosophical difference between "free software" and "open source" software.

[Blutrausch]

Thanks for all the great feedback!!!! I will look into making the web passed port, but one of my main goals was to beagle to play the game offline :/ oh well. I was thinking that you could easily have a few buttons that took care of inventory and spells etc. how difficult would it be to make the port, and would enough people use it to make it worth it?
Thanks!
Blutrausch

[Blutrausch]

I als o had a thought that maybe you could allot the app lots of ram, and set it to download everything from a server to run, so as long as you had the app running, you could play it with no internet connection

[TeshiAlair]

Semi-off topic, but I use JuiceSSH to play crawl online via my phone (it is the last smartphone ever with a slide out keyboard), so maybe there is an SSH client that would work with IOS?

[dowan]

one of my main goals was to beagle to play the game offline

Wow, it's impressive enough for a beagle to play the game on a pc, but on a smartphone? This dog must be a genius!

[tasonir]

I als o had a thought that maybe you could allot the app lots of ram, and set it to download everything from a server to run, so as long as you had the app running, you could play it with no internet connection

Making a completely native iOS port of crawl would be a pretty insane amount of work. You'd more or less be remaking crawl from scratch. You can run C code on iOS because objective C is a superset of C, but you'd likely have to redo all of the UI. Using a webview to open webtiles is much more possible. Allocating ram doesn't really work that way in computers in general, but especially so in iOS - you can't control how much memory your app gets. Whenever apple feels like it, it can send your app a memory warning, which it is up to you to respond to (you can define the method didReceiveMemoryWarning() and do things like unload views that are no longer on screen to free up memory). If you don't free up enough memory/keep requesting more memory, iOS will terminate your app.

Practically speaking I haven't run into this very often as the limits are opaque (at least I have no idea what they are, and I believe they vary by device), but as new generations of hardware are released the limits go up, so memory concerns aren't as bad as they were even 2 years ago, let alone 5 years ago. If you're supporting older devices it may be more of an issue.

I could look into doing the webview aimed at webtiles thing, you'd just have to figure out how to keep the keyboard open at all times.

[Blutrausch]

I was entertaining the thought of making it a simple touched based interface Do you guys think that this would be possible? I guess having it only be usable online is the only option.

[tasonir]

Technically, anything is possible. The only insurmountable obstacle is the legal issue where the app store and the GPL license are not compatible. But that doesn't prevent you from making a client that connects to webtiles, it's just a question of who can and is willing to do the work. If you aren't a programmer, keep in mind that non-programmers tend to vastly underestimate how much work it is to code things, and it can also be surprising what tasks are easy and what are actually hard. Example: http://xkcd.com/1425/

[Blutrausch]

I may not be a programmer but both my parents work for Sas in development so I do have some inkling. I have wanted to learn how to program, and now I have a reason too!! No matter how much in the end I believe it will be worth it!! If you guys don't feel the same way let me know, and if you are interested in helping please please let me know. Who knows maybe we are pretty close!! Thanks everyone!! One thing that may be very beneficial to the game is an ad system where you watch an add whenever and the money gained from that would go to the developers to help them make more content?? Or something of that sort IDK.

[tasonir]

Crawl isn't designed to have a simple tap interface - there are a great deal of commands and lots of options each turn. If you wanted to make an ipad roguelike, it's be best to start thinking of the interface first. You'd want to have simple combat where you mostly just tap on monsters to hit them and empty spaces to move to it, and have limited options besides attacking (an inventory for equipment and some potions, most likely). There would probably be few to no spells, although I suppose a deep magic system could be possible.

In short, you want to do something much closer to the enchanted cave 2 than crawl.

[floatboth]

Brogue, which wasn't initially designed for touch, was ported to the iPad and it's very playable there.

[archaeo]

Yeah, I also played through NetHack on my iPhone at one point. The port I had collected all the most common buttons on the bottom and then had menus for selecting everything else; it wasn't so bad.

Also, I haven't looked at the app store in awhile, but I seem to recall there was a paid app that was designed as a terminal client for connecting to NetHack and Crawl servers. You'd have to play with ascii, though.