Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Axecleaver2]

Toady, have you thought about porting your work to an app for iPhone or iPad? You could charge $5-10 and sell a whole bunch. See Wesnoth for a successful business use case.

You fan,
Axecleaver

[dragonshardz]

Assuming that the iPhone or iPad could even run DF, considering that it is a well-written program that has nonetheless crashed well-built computers.

[Capntastic]

Toady probably doesn't want to add touchscreen support, and he definitely isn't looking to charge for DF.

[G-Flex]

DF has trouble running on modern computers. There's effectively no way to get something like that working. The best you could really do is have a client app on the phone that connects to a computer somewhere else that's running it.

[Jake]

Touchscreen support is certainly something worth looking into for the future, once touchscreen monitors and Tablet PCs achieve greater market penetration, but porting DF to a glorified smartphone that can barely run it is a waste of effort at this stage.

An official DF client app isn't such a bad idea though, and charging for optional extras of that sort whilst leaving the core product freely available works well enough for Mozilla -or Ctrl+Alt+Delete for that matter- but that's probably going to have to wait until development is at least post-beta.

[Capntastic]

Ctrl+Alt+Delete

Why would anyone take queues from Buckley, ever?  Toady doesn't even have a strong inclination to sell merchandise.

[Jake]

Why would anyone take queues from Buckley, ever?  Toady doesn't even have a strong inclination to sell merchandise.

He's the first example of an individual who's turned his creative works into a profitable full-time job without charging for the core product whom I could think of on the spur of the moment. And if Buckley can make a comfortable living out of it despite overwhelming evidence that he's kind of a jerk, Toady could make an absolute fortune!

[Ullallulloo]

Touchscreen support is certainly something worth looking into for the future, once touchscreen monitors and Tablet PCs achieve greater market penetration, but porting DF to a glorified smartphone that can barely run it is a waste of effort at this stage.

An official DF client app isn't such a bad idea though, and charging for optional extras of that sort whilst leaving the core product freely available works well enough for Mozilla -or Ctrl+Alt+Delete for that matter- but that's probably going to have to wait until development is at least post-beta.

tbh, he should probably add mouse suport before touchscreen support. :p

[G-Flex]

despite overwhelming evidence that he's kind of a jerk

You forgot to mention the incompetence.

[Jake]

@Ullallulloo: I don't see much wrong with using the mouse to designate and the keyboard to scroll and navigate menu options, personally, but I can see how mouse-capable menus would be an important stepping stone to touchscreen functionality.

@G-Flex: I actually didn't think a certain plot twist was quite as bad as a lot of people make it out to be, but let's not get into that here. Still, my point stands; if he can make it work in the face of a severe handicap like that, Toady should find it a stroll in the park.
Besides, I don't know about you, but I'd certainly fork out for a Dwarf Fortress t-shirt.

[Scynix]

I keep seeing people say that it could barely run it.. why could it just be stripped down a tad?
You don't necessarily need a 256x256 world if you're playing for fun on a pad.
Nor do you need the thousands of historical figures, as the world would be smaller.

Heck, you could even call it DFlite. All the same great gameplay, in a small package.
Make physical sites smaller, 2x2. You can still (very succesfully) kill a massive fort of dorfs on a 2x2 map.
I've done it, sadly. =_=

The game is beautifully complex, but I think you're forgetting that, thanks to its complexness, you can do a lot to reduce system load without changing core mechanics.

The only real problem, IMHO, is that this game is already niche, could you imagine how niche it would be on ipad?

[Jake]

... The game is beautifully complex, but I think you're forgetting that, thanks to its complexness, you can do a lot to reduce system load without changing core mechanics...

Not to the point where it'll be playable on a 1GHz processor.

[Ethicalfive]

I really LOL'd reading the topic post.

Like previously mentioned, the only way you are *ever* going to see Dwarf Fortress on something as underpowered as an iPad, is by running dwarf fortress on another machine and connecting to it remotely. Maybe a 1x1 embark area with 7 dwarfs and no imigrants, fluids, weather, or multiple z levels it could be possible..

I second the t-shirt suggestion though!! What an effective way to generate interest, or get those "What is Dwarf Fortress?" questions happening.

[Jackrabbit]

I got 0 fps with a 1.2GHz processor and couldn't make it to the title screen. This isn't going to happen.

But a client app sounds really cool, actually.

[eerr]

The idea of dwarf fortress running on an iphone makes me lol.