Re: KODP Flash (Spoilers included)

From: David Dunham <david_at_...>
Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:50:00 -0700


Scott

>* 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.

Assuming all artwork could be simply scaled to 480x320 (from 640x480), you'd save about 25% moving to iPhone.

But remember KoDP was designed for CD distribution -- that's what there was 10 years ago. We intentionally didn't compress, because we didn't need to. I suspect that most of the full screen art could be compressed pretty heavily as JPEG without much quality loss.

>* 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'

The platform-specific code all came from mTropolis, so it would have to be completely redone for either Flash, iPhone, or for that matter Mac OS X or Windows 7. Completely.

And I don't really know that development systems today are easier to use for this sort of thing than mTropolis was. I'm still sore at Quark for killing it.

>* 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.

I'm guessing that the CPU/GPU on any iPhone would be fine.

-- 

David Dunham     A Sharp, LLC
Voice/Fax: 206 783 7404     http://a-sharp.com
Efficiency is intelligent laziness.

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