Mobile?

[Eighty7]

For starters, I would like to say: Great work devs! PS promises to be a rival to even World of Warcraft, but without the cost! No exaggeration.
Onto what I would like to see: I spend many hours everyday on a pocket pc, running windows mobile. If is possible, I would like to see PS go mobile. I'll even help out, if need be.
Thanks, and keep up the  great work!

While I can not debate the fact that mobile platforms are on the rise and are ushering more and more casual gamers into the market, developing for the mobile platform has different specifications then the PC.

With the current leaps and bounds with technology it is not entirely unthinkable that these mobile platforms will be able to handle PlaneShift, I don't foresee the Dev team focusing on the mobile platforms. The main problem with focusing on the mobile universe is that with the game being so early in development it would require a whole team to scale the client for a mobile device. The graphics engine would need to be adjusted to scale to smaller resolutions, new GUIs would need to be implemented, not to mention the internet service that would be required for such high packet activity.

I wont say its impossible for this to happen, but I don't think the dev team will put too much effort into making this come to life.

[vedrit]

true, the game needs to be finished before work can be made to make it compatible with other platforsm, but i was just saying that I would like to see it happen

[Manar]

This isn't all that hard. You can do the processing on a seperate machine, using a remote desktop.
In fact, just because I could, I already played PS on my phone. The framerate was low, and the 3D parts didn't look good, but that was because there was no hardware acceleration. It was enough to send some tells.

[Tuxide]

I just noticed that there was some competing (commercial) MMO engine that had support for mobile devices.  But I think the mobile engine is more limited to things like communicating with people and managing your inventory than actually moving around and killing things.

[Homik]

yeah storage is not the problem, the problem is still the graphic card of these devices. And, correct me if I'm wrong, you're PDA doesn't have a graphic card with more than 16mb memory. For PS this is simply not enough..

Minimum Requirements for PS:
GeForce 2 or higher 3D graphics card (64MB of video memory at least)
1 Ghz CPU
512 MB RAM
1 GB free disk space

maybe in a few years you can run ps on such a device...

I would just like to point out that if PS would be released on a mobile platform, the graphics and such would be drastically toned down. On such a tiny screen (average 400x600-ish) many details would not be even visible, therefore unnecisary, ergo there wouldn't be that much strain.

In the case of mobile graphics, nvidia is working on promising solutions: http://www.nvidia.com/page/handheld.html

Also, if you don't want to wait there is always oqo  http://www.oqo.com/

[kyeldon]

hi everybody, please convince the  devs in some time porting ps to a platform called "ARM"...

here's why: http://www.openpandora.org/index_en.php

ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
800x480 4.3" 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
Around 10+ Hours battery life

which seems to turn out VERY cool! here are some  prototype pics
http://www.gp2x.de/video/PandoraAngVid1.avi
which shows the operating system functioning without other certain hardware (which is still to build...)

The OpenPandora Handheld which is first and foremost centered into gaming activities will cost in europe:
Around £199 (inc VAT), $330, Euro212 (Ex.VAT)

This handheld will have in some day (perhaps not the upcoming next version, but maybe another version a bit later)
the power capacity to run even such games as planeshift...

Hope I could help you...

[weltall]

hi everybody, please convince the  devs in some time porting ps to a platform called "ARM"...

here's why: http://www.openpandora.org/index_en.php

ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
800x480 4.3" 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
Around 10+ Hours battery life

which seems to turn out VERY cool! here are some  prototype pics
http://www.gp2x.de/video/PandoraAngVid1.avi
which shows the operating system functioning without other certain hardware (which is still to build...)

The OpenPandora Handheld which is first and foremost centered into gaming activities will cost in europe:
Around £199 (inc VAT), $330, Euro212 (Ex.VAT)

This handheld will have in some day (perhaps not the upcoming next version, but maybe another version a bit later)
the power capacity to run even such games as planeshift...

Hope I could help you...

as it runs linux, if it also uses xserver normally and the gpu has an enough fill rate maybe you could be able to run it after compiling it  (not at it's best considering the 600mhz cpu) but should be playable

[DGMurdockIII]

why cant this be made mobile?     or just to be made to work on theses open source handhelds gaming devices like pandora - http://openpandora.org/ , GP2X Wiz - http://www.gp2xwiz.com/

[yanom]

We could even make a 2d client were you see everything from a birds-eye view. Such a 2d client could even (in theory) work on a cell phone.

[Caarrie]

We could even make a 2d client were you see everything from a birds-eye view. Such a 2d client could even (in theory) work on a cell phone.

no we cant,  we dont have a lot of artists as it is and that would take even more time to do on top of just making the 3d maps. it would also require a 2d client to be made and debugged which is more work on the testing team and the engine devs to even make.

[ThomPhoenix]

Once smartphones and PDAs become fast enough to run a decent operating system such as Windows or Linux with all graphics options enabled, they will be able to run PlaneShift. It's not really in the dev team's hands, you have to understand that. Creating a specific version of PlaneShift for the mobile phone would mean a totally new project. You can start one if you like

[Mythryndel]

I think that there are only really two options here for mobile PS...

1. Wait for hardware to catch up and be able to run a full OS...

2. Make a (mostly) new client.

I think that number 2 has the highest level of probability of success... but it would require a LOT of effort. I think that creating a mobile PS app that simply included the chat would be a great proof of concept. Allow your character to log in using the standard PS client/server code... but instead of presenting the user with a full 3D world, give a generic graphic for the region your character is in as the background and have the chat-window available.

Just my 2 trias, but I don't think that a mobile platform right now is going to work for a full-up MMO client... but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be useful to have bits and pieces.

[ThomPhoenix]

I'm just going to say it then...

It wouldn't be useful

[yanom]

We could even make a 2d client were you see everything from a birds-eye view. Such a 2d client could even (in theory) work on a cell phone.

no we cant,  we dont have a lot of artists as it is and that would take even more time to do on top of just making the 3d maps. it would also require a 2d client to be made and debugged which is more work on the testing team and the engine devs to even make.

You could make the graphics really, really crude.

[ThomPhoenix]

People assume that since a mobile phone is small, it will require really small effort to make a game for it. Let alone a game that has already been made for the PC.

For those people: Nopeh