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[slayorwrath]

Hi all, Was bored last night so I thought I'd try out what many have suggested, playing DF on a "smartphone".
I've heard a few ways of doing this, but ended up trying something a little different, there are some setbacks, some annoyances but ultimately some kind of success.

If any of you (I'm sure many of you do) work in IT/tech support you may have heard of or used Teamviewer, we use it at work for PC maintenence/updates etc from Sydney to Melbourne, well I looked it up on sunday and found for non-commercial use it's free. It's also available as an app for Android based smartphones (not sure about iPhones). I gave it a try via wifi at home on sunday night and well.... for one, it's slow, the controls using swiftkey were ok but a little cumbersome, the left/right/up/down keys moved the mouse instead of the ingame cursor so i had to use numerics instead. To zoom out so the game was more easily viewable... the screen was too small, for someone who has played this game to death and knows all the commands that may not be such an issue but for reading general text you'd be zooming in and out all the time (for any smartphone user this is probably normal anyway). The one thing that really irked me is how sloooooow it was, I was sitting in front of my laptop, playing DF on the phone, hell just trying to open the start menu, I click something on the desktop, my pc seems to almost instantly recognise the request my phone sent, but it takes between 3-8 seconds before my phone will show the change. I was wondering. anyone in the U.S want to try out teamviewer with DF, or just windows in general, and let me know what the lag is like? i'm not sure if I'm connecting through a server that bounces info between pc and phone (or pc and pc... whatever) or if i'm getting some kind of Hamachi'esque direct connect. either way it's pretty slow. but DF... on my phone... at work... on the train.... on the TOILET AT WORK!... lol

[ThatAussieGuy]

Oh god, don't let Dwarf Fortress be portable.  If we weren't terminally addicted before...


You've done an awesome terrible evil thing.

[MikaTheCrazy]

You just doomed someone to an eternity of Dwarf Fortress.

[Saiko Kila]

I've heard that Aussies are doomed to transfer-quota internet only, is that true? If so, this may be a costly addiction for some.

[Infiltrator]

I've heard that Aussies are doomed to transfer-quota internet only, is that true? If so, this may be a costly addiction for some.

Sadly, yes. 

[Talvieno]

Dwarf Fortress on phones... epicness. Scary, too.

[rampaging-poet]

If you don't mind playing in text mode (pretty sure it doesn't support graphics packs), there's also DFTerm, which shouldn't take up as much bandwidth as full-blown screen sharing does.  I haven't had a chance to try it out myself, but I've heard it works pretty well.

[Excedion]

You could just as easily port it to android yourself. I've tried doing this before on my local network and a tablet pc. Although as you said the input is instant the actually display is laggy as shit and terribly tempermental. I was using a different streaming app but im sure its all the same. An actual port of DF to android would be pretty fucking cool though

[i2amroy]

The largest problem with running DF on a phone is simply getting the game to run at any type of decent speed. That's the reason why just about everything designed for playing DF on portable things (some guy got it working on his iPad) relies on setting up a link to a computer somewhere to run the actual program. Currently phones and other portable devices just don't have enough raw power to really run DF even if you did succeed in porting it to the,.

[Blizzlord]

The largest problem with running DF on a phone is simply getting the game to run at any type of decent speed. That's the reason why just about everything designed for playing DF on portable things (some guy got it working on his iPad) relies on setting up a link to a computer somewhere to run the actual program. Currently phones and other portable devices just don't have enough raw power to really run DF even if you did succeed in porting it to the,.

Even the high end processors struggle to keep DF running in the greatest of forts.

[Phibes]

I faced similar performance problems with Team Viewer. Pocketcloud and 2x Client (both free) were faster. Splashtop Remote was by far the fastest, but it isn't free. The problem is that the SDL version of DF mangles the input from most of the remote clients and IME's available. Fortunately the legacy version of DF works well, but using it means losing access to the latest version of DFHack (if you care).

As for keyboards, try the "Hackers Keyboard" IME for full qwerty and function keys. It's free, check the Android Market Google Play store.

[rtg593]

I've used splashtop to play mmo's remotely on my phone; quite a challenge. But streaming seems to have little to no delay.

Don't know what it costs, I got it as one of Amazon's free app of the day. I think 5 bucks? Anyway, full use of your computer, keyboard and mouse, through you android or ios device.

Dunno about blackberry, but I read an article that their sales were plummeting and they'd probably close up shop soon, anyway, so who cares about them

[slayorwrath]

hmm, Splashtop sounds interesting, I might look into it, I'm not sure how much bandwidth using Teamviewer would cost me, but I'm running prepaid on optus, 10 bucks gets me 60 bucks credit and 60mb data allowance (obviously once you burn through the 60mb you start using the bonus credit) but I rarely use more than 3-4 dollars of it in phone calls in a week. Text messaging on the plan is free so.... I got 60 bucks credit to burn though on DF, and creeping out my wife from work, the other day I loaded up wmp and started playing random songs, then typing things to her in notepad hahaha.