Friday 10 September 2010

XAGE on iPhone

About a year ago if I'd been asked the likelihood of XAGE running on any of Apple's handhelds, I'd have said it was about as likely as Duke Nukem Forever being released.

However, after several weeks of tinkering, head-scratching and cursing, it's finally up and running on the iPhone/iPad emulator using the magic of MonoTouch and XnaTouch:



Caveats:
  • Obviously, this is an emulator and not the real thing. It's difficult to say what performance will be like on the actual hardware.
  • Audio isn't working yet, and various things are currently unsupported in the XnaTouch framework (RenderTargets etc - the usual suspects).
  • Zero thought has been put into the touch interface. It's likely any game that uses more than one mouse button will need to have the UI re-designed.
  • MonoTouch is a commercial framework, with a slightly eye-watering $400 one-off license fee (although thankfully Novell do offer a non-expiring free trial).
Apple's announcement yesterday that they're relaxing the Terms & Conditions of their Developer License could not have come at a better time, as it pretty much guarantees the safe passage of any XAGE game to the App Store.

2 comments:

Ben304 said...

Amazing!

I've been approached about iPhone games before and it's always involved totally build from the ground up engines, scaling of graphics and the like. This is way cooler, I have to say!

Interesting to see if it could be converted across 100% to iPhone - although I admit that things like the use of SeekMP3PosMillis(); mean ! probably is not an ideal candidate for conversion.

Still, watching your progress with much interest, and looking forward to see where this goes.

Clarvalon said...

It's funny you mention that, the MP3 seek functionality is being left to last as, weirdly, there's no support in XNA to skip to a certain point in a song. I have a feeling it may be added as part of v4.0 though, and there's a possible workaround I have that may work.