Windows Mobile has never had a good reputation. Microsoft are looking to change that with Windows Mobile 7, which looks very ZuneHD in nature.
The good news is that Windows Mobile 7 will support XNA natively, meaning for the first time XAGE should be directly supported on a smartphone. This is a very different to the proposed iPhone support, which remains purely hypothetical at this stage.
XAGE Awakener has been in the wild for a week and has been received pretty well. I've learnt a few things that will come in useful for future commercial releases. General consensus is that lack of RMB support is a pain, though this should be rectified once Silverlight v4 comes out of beta.
It is a relief to have something tangible to show after nearly two years of development. I feel like Silverlight has been proven to be a viable release platform for adventure games. The next two major milestones are to do the same for the Xbox360 and also release a stable version of XAGE Editor.
I've had a handful of approaches from individuals about working on some other projects, so it will be interested to see if any of those pan out. In the meantime, there's still plenty to be getting on with. Amongst those is, yes, revisiting Awakener. As alluded to in the conversion video, the on_mouse_click function isn't yet handled and all user input is still hardcoded in XAGE. Once this is sorted it should add a new level of usability to other converted AGS games. Other short terms goals include:
- Cleaning up XAGE Editor.
- Completing GUI editing.
- Adding support for OpenQuest's GUIs.
- Updating The Fourth Wall to the latest version (replacing deprecated actions).
