On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 4:30 PM, Michael Akinde <michael.yahoo_at_...>wrote:
> outis02 skrev:
> > Interface design tools have progressed a long way in this past 10 years.
> I have a hard time believing that remaking, and improving, the KoDP in a
> modern framework would be such a difficult undertaking
> I agree with respect to the interface. I think the main challenge of a
> remake would be the task of remaking the interpreter for the massive
> body of Opal scripts that make up this game. Unless one could actually
> port the code used to interpret the script, somehow.
>
To do my own blueskying about alternate platforms, I'd love to be able to
play KODP- the full game- on an iPhone/iTouch. From my pit of ignorance I
don't see any flat-out impossiblities, but the impracticalities are:
- Size: 450Mb is pretty big for an app, at least one bought over the net. I
presume you could save some space by using smaller images but maybe not
enough. It seems like a standard coding strategy is to keep a lot of data
compressed right up until it's used and that could trade space for execution
time.
- No idea how difficult it would be to port the Mac code to the iPhone since
I've never developed on either platform. My presumption is 'decidedly
nontrivial but not impossible'
- Interface would need at least some tweaks because a lot of the controls
are pretty small and fiddly to do with a finger. Some things could be moved
around or done in various zooms or multi-page views, but now you're
modifying engine code and sending the development cost up sharply.
- Is the underlying CPU powerful enough? I imagine it is; if standard
machines ten years ago could run KODP a modern handheld should be able to.
- The killer: can A# sell enough of these for five or ten bucks to pay for
the above? The people on this list might pay more, but I think to hook
impulse buys it needs to be inexpensive, expecially if it doesn't have a
demo (costing more $ to make.) People could go check out the tour but that
means you've lost the impulse buyer.
--
Scott E Kullberg --><-- sekullbe_at_...
The longer I live, the more I see that I am never wrong about
anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my
notions have only wasted my time. -- George Bernard Shaw
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