RPG's for the iPhone

Since I've fallen for Apple's scam and bought an iPhone, I'm interested in RPG's for it. There have been one or two thread on the Watch, like the one about Vay and the other one in development that is references in that thread. There are a few mobile RPG enthusiasts among us, too, I think, so... what's the state of things now? Still only a port of an old RPG? No Final Fantasies? Do you think we'll see a DS-like library of RPG games?

In the meantime, I think I'll have to look into this Vay.

I just got a blackberry curve and I don't know I hadn't thought of this. The games I've found so far are silly. There is a version of Zork (mini-zork) but so far the links for it are out of date and the way to get the real zork on it is convoluted.

What I'd really like to is to be able to develop for it. It looks like Flash CS3, for example, has a feature built in for mobile design.

Thaurin said:

what's the state of things now? Still only a port of an old RPG? No Final Fantasies? Do you think we'll see a DS-like library of RPG games?

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I think you have covered the state of things. I haven't seen any pre-release announcements or heard of any developers working on anything. Carmack has stated Id is interested in the iPhone, so I suspect we will see an Orcs & Elves port - perhaps with updated graphics. Carmack also thinks the iPhone market can't handle a 10 million market yet and I think that will prevent a "DS-like library of RPG games".

I would also speculate Square Enix will release something since they did Song Summoner on the iPod.

It's a difficult market to gauge: I've heard developers say the market changes every day. The barrier to entry is low and the Torque and Unity engines are being ported. Indie developers are going to be a wildcard.

Yes, there are definitely some coming, but the future-view is so short on these things that it is hard to tell what and when. Especially frustrating when I try to be on top of these things!

Maybe I should make one myself. The iPhone looks like a good toy to play a good RPG on. With all its features and graphical power, there are plenty of possibilities.

The iPhone (or iPod Touch like I have) is actually much more powerful than the DS or PSP, and even more powerful than the Dreamcast. So there are some clear possibilities.

Wish I had time to fiddle with programming for it.

I learned that Vay for iPhone has only been released to the US market, so I'm out of luck on RPG's for now. Is the iPhone more powerful than the PSP, though? The PSP has some seriously powerful graphics capabilities (for a mobile device).

Yes it is - >600MHz vs. 333MHz mac for PSP, and a more powerful graphics processor. I don't have the link handy ...

It's the graphics processor I'm not sure about... the iPhone's ARM processor runs at a higher clock frequency, true. But can it even be relaibly compared? Since it's a completely different instruction set, I would think... the PSP more specialized towards gaming.

I'm not sure what graphics chip the PSP has, but the graphics I've seen on the PSP are generally more detailed. Maybe the iPhone just has still to get into its own, but the PSP graphics resemble that of the PS2, which were powerful in their own right.

What does the iPhone have? Monkeyball. While it's cool, it's not a very good comparison. But I'd be glad to agree, because I have the iPhone and not the PSP (and very happy with it ).

I'm going to look into iPhone development, too. All my Apple-oriented collegues are bugging me to develop for it. Maybe I can utilize that OpenGL ES API for some cool RPG action.

Thaurin said:

It's the graphics processor I'm not sure about... the iPhone's ARM processor runs at a higher clock frequency, true. But can it even be relaibly compared? Since it's a completely different instruction set, I would think... the PSP more specialized towards gaming.

I'm not sure what graphics chip the PSP has, but the graphics I've seen on the PSP are generally more detailed. Maybe the iPhone just has still to get into its own, but the PSP graphics resemble that of the PS2, which were powerful in their own right.

What does the iPhone have? Monkeyball. While it's cool, it's not a very good comparison. But I'd be glad to agree, because I have the iPhone and not the PSP (and very happy with it ).

I'm going to look into iPhone development, too. All my Apple-oriented collegues are bugging me to develop for it. Maybe I can utilize that OpenGL ES API for some cool RPG action.

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The best collection of information of what is in the iPhone I've seen is at TouchArcade. My understanding is the PSP has a better GPU, but weaker CPU. Until I see many animated figures like in Crazy Taxi, I wouldn't agree with the claim that the iPhone is like or better than a DreamCast.

OpenGL ES isn't too hard if you know OpenGL. I ported the Irrlicht engine, but it ran slow and I didn't have time to optimize it. It looks like others are going to release a version. It will be interesting to see how their port runs.

Also be sure to check out Oolong if you do any 3D development.

I've never used OpenGL, nor have I ever done 3D development. I have also never done development on a Mac and I am completely unfamiliar with Objective-C. So this is going to be interesting. I'm not expecting miracles, but a new challenge is nice. I think C#/.NET has made me lazy.

Thanks for the links. Those look interesting to play with after I get up and running with the basics.

Apparently Carmack agrees that the iPhone is a powerful device that can hold its own against the PSP and DS (actually it says it's more powerful than both combined, but I'm still a bit sceptical, but others agree).

Meanwhile, FRIST POTS!!!11 on a Mac!!1 I've taken home an iMac from work to start experimenting with XCode and Mac/iPhone development. If you can offer any help when I need it, that'd be much appreciated.

Thaurin said:

If you can offer any help when I need it, that'd be much appreciated.

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Hey Thaurin,

Sorry I missed your post, I hope dev it's going well. Feel free to PM me as I won't miss those. Hopefully you haven't gotten too frustrated with code signing I have yet to met a dev that hasn't experienced some pain, suffering, confusion, and/or many lost hours trying to come to gripes with that. Just remember you aren't the only one.

Here are forums where people are actively violating their NDAs. You might want to look here for help you need immediately.
http://forums.macrumors.com/forumdisplay.php?f=135
http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-development/
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=727&start=0

As far as learning Obeject-C Scott Stevenson has a couple nice blog entries
ObjC -
http://theocacao.com/document.page/565
ObjC 2.0 -
http://theocacao.com/document.page/510
http://theocacao.com/document.page/516

Be sure to read about Categories in the tutorial. Really helps in keeping you from subclassing too much. Probably most of your time however will be figuring out the libraries as Obj-C is a pretty easy language when you exclude the C part.

Hey, thanks for coming back to me about this.

I haven't been totally dedicated lately, but at least I've made some progress. The biggest thing is getting the hang of Xcode and Interface Builder after being raised on Visual Studio (and indeed the Obj-C libraries as they seem totally alien to me; [[NSString alloc] init] ????). I've got a "Hello, world!" type app running on my jailbroken phone, having manually code signed it through SSH, so at least it's a start. At some point, it's possible that I'll sign up for Apple's Developer Program, so that I can make things available in the App Store.

Thanks for the links. These are resources that I had not found yet. I'm working through some books and videos and that's going well. Objective-C is a change from the C# I'm used to and in some ways feels like a step back. C# produces more readable code to me, but that's probably because I know it better. All in all, I like how Xcode performs, as well as how much better Mac OS X is over Windows.

But as this isn't a development forum, I'll take you up on the PM offer if I run into any trouble.

Developing an RPG for the iPhone may be a long way off, but maybe there are teams working on one in need of another developer. Maybe a free game (or port of an open source project) will show up in the App Store some day. Maybe some day I can contribute to that.

Thaurin said:

Objective-C is a change from the C# I'm used to and in some ways feels like a step back. C# produces more readable code to me, but that's probably because I know it better.

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You could say Obj-C is an old language (based on C and Smalltalk) and C# is a new one, which could account for that "step back" feeling. Be happy you aren't a Ruby programmer looking at Obj-C

Also since Smalltalk was basically objects and messages to those objects, you end up some "odd" verbosity and lots of '['s and ']'s.

zzajin said:

Also since Smalltalk was basically objects and messages to those objects, you end up some "odd" verbosity and lots of '['s and ']'s.

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Yeah, and reference counting, apparently. The iPhone OS doesn't support garbage collection? But, if I understand correctly, you even need to release your objects in dealloc with garbage collection on in Mac OS X code?? I haven't had to think about that in years! All seems cumbersome and prone to memory leaking to me, but maybe I'm just too "modern."

I just upgraded and jailbroke my iPhone to firmware 2.1, good times. I'll fire up Xcode some more tomorrow and maybe look at some actual iPhone stuff again instead of just Cocoa.

Thaurin said:

Yeah, and reference counting, apparently. The iPhone OS doesn't support garbage collection? But, if I understand correctly, you even need to release your objects in dealloc with garbage collection on in Mac OS X code?? I haven't had to think about that in years! All seems cumbersome and prone to memory leaking to me, but maybe I'm just too "modern."

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Best way for me to answer about GC and not break the NDA is to say - according to this blog the iPhone has no GC

http://practicalmadness.com/2008/03/iphone_sdk_firs

GC was added to Obj-C 2.0 when Leopard came out. So us Cocoa developers have been dealing with ref counting for awhile and yes it leads to leaking memory errors (there are tools to help track them down). But it's easier to deal with than malloc/dealloc and associated seg faults in C.

I haven't really done any GC in Leopard, but what I have seen or heard is that it's pretty flexible. So you might be thinking about when a dev decides to do their own deallocs.

It also results in more code to write and I find that slightly annoying, having grown used to the conveniences of Visual Studio. The thing is, as I'm reading Cocoa tutorials, I have to be aware of what works in Mac OS X and not iPhoneOS. I'm thinking that maybe now it would be better to just go play with some iPhone code examples rather than reading documentation.

I thought about getting an iPod Touch v2 but then I noticed, wait!, no eaily user-replaceable battery?! (This was after I was thinking about getting a PSP then an OpenPandora.) [EDIT] Also dropped it for gaming as it has no game controls, and I don't think that many games will work well with only touch screen or the accelerometer control. As to power, well it doesn't matter if the games are crap, and since Apple is good about promising gaming, but not delivering I'm expecting more of the same plus a few crappy token games. Even then it's still all about the games, and I bet that the PSP and DS will still be better gaming platforms overall with better developers. [/EDIT]

So then, I trundled along and looked at the netbooks, but decided to wait for a while as the Intel Atom N330 (dual core) should be along soon in units and hopefully better GPUs, as most just use Intel GMA950s IIRC right now. They're already useful in tha PSX emulators run well according to reports and some windows games are actually playable.

Still thinking about a netbook, then I stumbled across avadirect.com that has some pretty good cutomization options, and happen to have a notebook with a Geforce 9600M GT which is pretty good for a notebook with Core 2 Duo @ 2.26GHz, 2GB RAM, WiFi card came out to be like $960 but it's HUGE 15.4" so I'm still waiting to see what happens. (I keep hoping for notebook with GPUs on mini PCIe cards and that nVidia/ATI actually make a variety of cards in that format...)

Other drawbacks of the netbooks are the SSD ones seem to usually have a fast smaller OS partition c. 4-8GB dependent upon model, then the balance of "drive" space on a slower larger SSD, usually Intel 8-32GB. The hdd based ones look better, esp the $120+ GB ones which are usually cheaper than the netbooks with useful storage capacity, i.e. 40GB SSD.

But, I'm still really hoping that some of the next generation netbooks have MUCH better GPUs even if they aren't in the 9600M GT class just about anything is better than any Intel GPU(pretty sad that they can't get a GPU right...)

[EDIT]
There are a few AMD Turion x2 netbooks, which by default NEVER use Intel chipsets, hence no Intel GPU but they're still pretty weak. Unfortunately it sounds like AMD is coming out with a special CPU for netbooks & UMPCs with integrated gra[phics of some kind, but the Turions could still be worth a look in the small form factor and maybe someone will even release one with a semi-modern/useful GPU...
[/EDIT]

Can't say anything about Netbooks (how small are these things, by the way? I think it'd still be a touch fit for my pocket. ). The games that I have seen in iPhone, however, show immense promise.

In some situations, having touch screen controls is actually superior over a thumbstick (or whatever they can them). In Vay, you can just point-and-click your way through and it works pretty well. Puzzle games like Bejeweled benefit hugely from such controls. Racing and flying games use the accelerometer admirably and board games control like a dream.

It's just the games that try to emulate D-pad controls or stick that struggle. Usually they put on some on-screen buttons that look like a D-pad and you'll just have to learn to put your finger on the right position without tactile feedback. It works, though, but twitch gaming on iPhone will not work well.

I see big potential for RPG games, though. I'm eagerly awaiting for a 3D free-roaming RPG.