angband on iphone?

[Nick]

FAAngband has pretty elegant mouse-driven controls, which may be a good place to start.

If I knew anything about cocoa, and/or had any prospect of getting it done any time soon, I would be tempted to have a go at this myself. As it is, I think FA would certainly be a good starting point (it runs on Windows Mobile and the Nintendo DS), and I'd be very happy to help anyone who did take this on.

[dionysian]

recent versions of vanilla would make sense. they include mouse movement, which would probably go a long way towards moving/attacking with a touch screen. also, the menu system for commands would be ideal. i would NOT want to play angband on an iphone with a keyboard.

[chem]

Well at the very least, someone should take the latest CVS of vanilla and the old work done on porting Angband to the Cocoa API, and get things working. If there is a Cocoa port of the latest Angband, committed to the CVS, then making an iphone port will be 100x easier if anyone wants to give it a shot one day.

To the non-OS X people reading this: Cocoa is an API, like Win32 or .NET is an API. The current OS X ports use the old "Carbon" API. The iphone uses an API manifestly simiar to Cocoa.

Angband desperately needs a Cocoa port to keep up with the times on Apple hardware and OS X.

[Lebannen]

I'm not sure about "desperately". Apple has made it clear that Carbon is now a second-class citizen and will not see API or architectural improvements; on the other hand, I'm also pretty sure they won't be dumping on Photoshop and Office *again* in 10.6 Carbon won't be going away any time soon, and it's not like Angband needs access to 64-bit or the latest and greatest APIs until someone writes a 3D interface to Ang...!

On the other hand, I agree with you in that Cocoa is where all the development attention has been for years. Everything these days is easier and better on Cocoa. I significantly upgraded Angband's sound system in 3.1.0 - it now supports more sound formats, it loads the files far more quickly, and it was all achieved in much less code - by dropping in some Cocoa calls. The modern Carbon code to achieve the same thing was far, far more complex.

However, even bringing the RidiculousFish 3.0.6 port up-to-date with the current codebase is no light undertaking, let alone implementing the remaining outstanding features (like multiple term support...). It is (you may or may not be glad to hear) near the top of my list now, only behind distributing the updated 3.1.0 mac code to a couple of other variants, but that list hasn't moved in a month or so...

[chem]

On the other hand, I agree with you in that Cocoa is where all the development attention has been for years. Everything these days is easier and better on Cocoa.

It is (you may or may not be glad to hear) near the top of my list now, only behind distributing the updated 3.1.0 mac code to a couple of other variants, but that list hasn't moved in a month or so...

Thanks for the update. It's just that Cocoa-like APIs are obviously the way forward on the ipod touch / iphone, so a cocoa port of Angband is inevitable (for either a future non-Carbon OS X or the mobile devices). If you're making progress on the Cocoa port and need any help debugging / testing, please send me a message or make a post calling for Cocoa help.

[bio_hazard]

Just posted this in the features sticky, but there's now a port of Rogue for the iPod Touch. It integrates the accelerometers and touch screen pretty well.

[tom042]

Awesome, do you have a link to the Rogue port? It's enough of a reason for me to finally try a different roguelike (beside UMoria many moons ago and a brief foray into failing to learn Dwarf Fortress.)

I've also been waiting for an Angband port to iPhone OS. Personally, I doubt either the mouse based movement or accelerometer based movement would be very practical. You would need to have the characters be huge for the mouse movement to be precise, and the accelerometer is always vulnerable to mistakes. I'd rather have just 8-directional swipe gestures with a softkey you can hold down to run. Along with a button to bring down a bar of macros and one to bring up the keyboard, I think that'd be all the interface you need for a generally playable Angband.

Edit: Wow, this Rogue UI is really quite sophisticated. I guess an Angband port can mostly just look to it for clues.

[bio_hazard]

Here's a link to the Rogue developer. I think you might have to get the app through the app store though.

http://projects.gandreas.com/rogue/index.html

I was pretty impressed with the interface too. The one thing I'd like to see was a 3x3 grid appear when you start to swipe so you know exactly where to draw the symbol.

I can see why Rogue was so popular, but I can also see why people wanted to add more- with no character classes, stores, unique monsters, or artifacts, it doesn't really compare to Angband.

[rdermyer]

Awesome! My girlfriend just got an iPod Touch for early Christmas...

[chem]

Here's a link to the Rogue developer. I think you might have to get the app through the app store though.

http://projects.gandreas.com/rogue/index.html

I was pretty impressed with the interface too. The one thing I'd like to see was a 3x3 grid appear when you start to swipe so you know exactly where to draw the symbol.

I can see why Rogue was so popular, but I can also see why people wanted to add more- with no character classes, stores, unique monsters, or artifacts, it doesn't really compare to Angband.

That developer has also apparently done some work on nethack for iphone:

http://projects.gandreas.com/nethack/

[chem]

I have posted on that developer's forum about Angband, here:

http://boards.gandreas.com/viewtopic.php?p=1451