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by taormina
26 days ago
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HN titles are not the best. Have you ported a desktop title to mobile? It is NOT trivial. This is the next step in a continuing chain of work that builds upon the next and next person's work, but this is not a trivial step. If it was so trivial, why hadn't it already been done? The jump to Apple Silicon is net-new work, and they aren't trying to pretend they did more than they did. > This fork — the iOS/iPadOS port (arm64-ios cross-build, DXVK-on-iOS, touch controls, app lifecycle, packaging) and engine fixes, offered upstream They are even asking you to support the original creators on Steam, so they are getting a cut. No one is stealing assets. I would love to see more of this sort of work being done out in the wild, not discouraging it. Were previous steps harder? Absolutely. Doesn't that invalidate this step? No. |
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I created and maintain a cross-platform wrapper library (several over the decades actually) which among other platforms supports macOS and iOS, so I have an idea what's involved.
This is a game that renders its own UI, it only needs to use AppKit/UIKit for creating the application window, and from then on hand off all rendering to Metal. When you already have working 'Metal-heavy' macOS code, porting to iOS is indeed trivial these days, the Apple-specific code is at least 90% identical between macOS and iOS.
The main difference is mouse input vs touch input, but that's also not a big deal for an RTS since it only needs 'click', 'zoom', 'pan' and 'dragbox-select'.
> If it was so trivial, why hadn't it already been done?
Because maybe the author of the original Linux+macOS port simply didn't care about iOS or didn't want to put up with the messy iOS development workflow in Xcode?