brunzenstein wrote:All this negative opinions regarding portability of Factorio to iOS can easily be proven (by me) as false estimations by people knowing Macs and iPhones / iPads only from window shopping - I shall share a real world example and prove my point:
A game similar to Factorio "This war of Mine" barely runs on my truly vintage 2008 Macbook - it runs but slow as molasses.
De facto unplayable.
Factorio in turn runs on the same stone age machine quite well.
Now to the discussion point - iOS - speak iPad/iPone:
The very same "This war of Mine" (renders black & white only graphics!) performs on my iPhone and iPad as fast as I could wish - lighting fast indeed. And the port from PC/Mac to iOs is not a iota less powerful on iOs or a slimed down version - both are the real thing. The same goes for a similar game "Transistor" (quite bit more cpu demanding then TWOM) - performs hopelessly slow on my vintage MacBook & PC but fast as a weasel on iOS.
This are real world empirical experiences - and they are all what counts.
Having cleared that surrounding fog now that burns down to the two real decisive questions:
- is a port to iOs commercial valid?
- do we have the manpower to do it
Answer today AFAIK:
first: YES - the iOS platform is commercially more then very interesting
second: NO - sorry, we don't have the programmers we would need for such a task today - maybe tomorrow we have
I'm just gonna reply because someone made a new topic about Mobile ports and I thought this is a great time to bring this thread back.
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Okay I did some research:
these are Minimum PC system requirements for This War of Mine, and Transistor:
Transistor:
OS: Windows 7 32-bit.
Processor: Dual Core CPU - 2.6ghz.
Memory: 4 GB RAM.
Graphics: 1GB of VRAM: Intel HD 3000 GPU / AMD HD 5450 / Nvidia 9400 GT.
Storage: 3 GB available space.
This War of Mine:
OS: Windows XP SP3 (32 bit) / Vista
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo 2.4, AMD Athlon(TM) X2 2.8 Ghz
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: Geforce 9600 GS, Radeon HD4000, Shader Model 3.0, 512 MB
I'l put GPU aside, because its not at all an issue, just the game called Dead Trigger on mobile can prove the graphical prowess of mobile phones.
These are not at all demanding even for a Mobile phone, The Iphone 6 has a A8 processor, which has two cores and runs at 1.4 GHz which may sound odd but its one of the fastest CPU's on the mobile market, beating Qualcomm Snapdragon 805, which is the fastest smartphone processor available to Android phones, even when the Snapdragon 805 has four cores and runs at a speed of up to 2.7GHz which can get really hot and I hate it.... my hands get sweaty after holding my phone.
The reason for that is the A8's architecture is more efficient when it comes to handling processes, I won't go in depth to it, read about it
here.
so with that, the games you listed are not entirely demanding, but does use quite a bit of power, and lastly I find it unreasonable to compare a game like This War of Mine and Transistor with an open sandbox game like Factorio where the limit is your imagination, although Factorio can theoretically run on Mobile, it does not ensure you will have the best performance once you reach near end game hell even mid game where you have almost thousands of assemblers, bots, conveyor belts, items, trains moving on a 1 screen, do people want to buy a game which starts to become sluggish once you reach a certain point? I don't know... but in my opinion, I won't although it can be fun to play Factorio on a phone on a train and miss the train stop I was gonna go to because I'm too busy fiddling with my factory, I don't like the idea of buying a game which starts to become sluggish at a certain point in the game, and that is not even considering the screen size, and screen clutter.
and the question is an IOS or Android port valid? well it depends, Its valid that people will want to have a mobile port, but is it valid on technical side, is an entirely different story.