Snowy_River wrote:So, I may get more of the same, but I'm astonished at the thread cr@pping going on here. A user posts an idea and not one person posts an honest reply to his idea. Everyone jumps in to come up with a criticism or insult for the original poster. Not very good netiquette, if you ask me.
It is also poor netiquette to join a forum and explain how everyone posting in that forum is being rude. There is a reason that people were rude: the idea was not new, and had already been discussed several times in the past. The fact that the original poster created not one, but two new topics to discuss an idea that had been beaten into the ground was a breach of netiquette. If he had used the forum search link, or Google, he could have found several topics about Darwinia (and other IV games) on iDevices. In fact,
this post is the [url=iphone site:forums.introversion.co.uk/darwinia]seventh search result[/url], and the first result that is not either this topic, or obviously useless.
You come here to lecture us on netiquette, yet utterly fail to be polite yourself. Go jump in a lake.
Snowy_River wrote:Personally, I'm interested in the original topic. I'd love to see Darwinia ported to the iOS. In the other thread, one poster commented that the iPhone didn't have enough power to handle such a game. Given the original system requirements, I can't understand this argument:
System requirements
600 MHz CPU
128MB RAM
60MB hard disk
16MB graphic card
The latest crop of iOS devices certainly stand up to those requirements.
I have played both Darwinia and Multiwinia on systems with a 1 GHz CPU with a 64 MB ATi card (a Mac PowerBook to be precise). I have also played both games on a MacBook Air with a 2 GHz CPU and Intel Graphics. Multiwinia is unplayable on the PowerBook and sometimes drops a lot of frames on the MBA. Darwinia generally does okay on the MBA, but becomes almost unplayably slow on the PowerBook. The listed requirements are the minimum to get the game to run at all, not what is really needed to play the game well.
Now, to address your claim about iOS devices meeting even those woefully inadequate requirements: as far as I can tell, neither the
iPad nor the
iPhone has a dedicated graphics chip/card, which means that the (at most) 1 GHz CPU is going to have to handle graphics. This is going to be a problem. The other requirements are easily met, but they hardly matter if the machine does not have the horsepower to even run the game.
Snowy_River wrote:Another comment was that the screen was too small. While for some people this may be an issue, I've seen plenty of games that I wouldn't want to play on an iPhone or iPod Touch screen for that reason that seem to do fantastically well. So, that doesn't seem to be a good argument for not porting the app over.
Why not? Much of the joy of Darwinia is to be found in being able to actually see the graphics. Why can't IV make the decision, from an aesthetic or artistic point of view, that the iPhone screen is too small, and that they don't want to see their game reduced to that state? Also, have you ever actually tried running Darwinia at a lower resolution? I've played at 640x480, and let me tell you, it sucks, even on a larger screen. There just aren't enough pixels to display all of the information needed to play the game well. It would be even worse on a smaller screen.
Snowy_River wrote:Plus, at this point, the iPhone and iPod Touch are not the only game in town for the iOS. My interest stems from the fact that I'd love to be able to play Darwinia on my iPad (not being a fan of the small screen game play much myself, either).
So, basically, you agree that the iPhone screen is too small, and are advocating for the iPad. That's great. Unfortunately, at the time that this topic was posted, the iPad did not yet exist. This topic was posted in March, a month before the iPad was released. At the time that this discussion occurred, iPhone/iTouch
was the only game in town for iOS.
And now you know why bumping old topics makes you look like an ass.
Snowy_River wrote:I think that the idea of porting Darwinia to iOS is a very good one and one that the developers should strongly consider.
The developers have repeatedly stated that they are sick and tired of *winia, and don't want to do anything more with it. On the other hand, since this topic was posted, IV have released the source code for *winia. So if anyone with programming ability agreed with you, they could certainly create the port themselves (though they would likely have to get permission from IV---I don't know how restrictive the license is).
xander