Torque on the IPHONE?

#1 This would be great, but it would almost certainly have to be based on a special deal between Apple and Garage Games, because:

- There is no application developers kit or program publicly available for the iPhone.
- There is no sanctioned way to load custom software

Alternatively, if some very popular game were developed with Torque, Apple might make a deal directly with the developer. But it's not at all clear that Apple thinks games are important to have on the iPhone.

#2 Interesting. Would any one else be interested in something like this?

#3 I asked about building tge or tgb for the PSP... Basically the answer I got was, sure If i happened to have a psp sdk, and had the time to really want to do it for my own amusement go ahead, but it really probably would never lead to a marketable product. And something about violating the licence somehow...

#4 Who license? GG or PSP?

#5 PSP (Sony's)

In order to code for Sony's consoles, you have to go through an interview process. You must be a game company and you must have some successful games made already. If not, they will not let you code for their systems. After you pass the interview, you give them $10,000 for the development machine. You don't actually own the tool kit, and must be given back when Sony asks for it. When you are done, you must submit the game for Sony's approval and they create the disks for you.

You can port Torque to a PSP with hacked firmware, but good luck trying to sell the game. Sony will unleash the lawyers of you try and make a buck off the system.

#6 Wow this industry is a bit tougher than I thought. Oh well just a question if which I had not ask I would not have got these answers thanks!

#7 It looks like Apple will open up the iPhone to external developers in February:

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2007/10/15/daily48.html

Hopefully it won't be too hard to get TGE running on it... We think our game would be great on the iPhone/iPod Touch

#8 I believe the iPhone's CPU is an ARM processor? Probably without an FPU? Even if you ported it over, it'd be slow as molasses.

#9 Well you wouldnt be coding up a MMO on the thing. Just some casual stuff.

#10 Well yeah, but TGE is even out of the question if it doesn't have an FPU (granted you can do stuff with fixed point, but that's a LOT of work to convert every float in Torque). And you'd still have to rewrite any of the optimizations that were made in x86 (or PPC) code for ARM. What I'm saying is that 3D with Torque is basically out of the question if it's an ARM CPU. Or any CPU not x86 or PPC for that matter.

Definitely not undoable, but certainly also not worthwhile or really feasible.

Edit: not doable should have been "not undoable" rather.

#11 I am talking straight TGB only. I know some of the same conversion would have to take place, but think it would be a cool idea. Or maybe even GG could get some type of "mobile" tools out there.

#12 Well, TGB seems quite a bit more reasonable, but I still think it'd be a lot of work :)

#13 There should be an SDK released in Feb '08, not sure if it will be public or licensed. I'm assuming Feb is when Apple will be released form its monopoly contracts with ATT for the US and TMobie for Europe.

#14 According to engadget, the iPhone does have a floating point co-processor:

Quote:From what we can tell, it looks like the iPhone's got a 620MHz ARM chip running under the hood. Specifics:
* ARM1176JZF chip with TrustZone (enables trusted computing environment for media, apps, network, OS, etc. -- very bad for hackers)
* Can vary in clock speed up to 700MHz or more, depending on implementation (thanks, Nigma)
* ARM Intelligent Energy Manager (claimed to reduce power consumption 25-50% in portables)
* 16K / 16K cache
* Features vector floating point coprocessor ("for embedded 3D-graphics")
* ARM Jazelle enabled for embedded Java execution (hmm...)
* SIMD, high perf integer CPU (8-stage pipeline, 675 Dhrystone, 2.1 MIPS)
* 0.45 mW/MHz power draw (with cache)

www.engadget.com/2007/07/01/iphone-processor-found-620mhz-arm/

This makes sense considering that they are reportedly using a significant subset of OS X and it's graphics libraries. So most likely, just like other OS X machines, the iPhone uses Display Postscript, which is heavily dependent on floating point.

#15 @Ed, that's cool. However, it'd still be a LOT of work converting most of the x86/PPC assembly optimizations to ARM. I just threw out a guess that it wouldn't have an FPU considering most ARM processors don't. In any case, it'd definitely be cool to have Torque on the iPhone.

Edit: I should note I have a small amount of ARM experience from helping to port Quake to PalmOS :)

#16 I would like to see Torque on some portable devices. I just replied to Zepps thread on T2 asking if it would be on new devices. It would be neat to see GG expand their foot print a bit more.

#17 @Ross:

I don't think it will be a trivial port, but it's really hard to know for certain. There are no PPC assembly optimizations as far as I know in Torque, so there should be C/C++ implementations of all the functionality that already works with current gcc compilers. But there can still be quite a few problem just in this area.

Some other issues that seem likely:

- Torque on the Mac is written to the Carbon APIs, whereas by all reports the iPhone has a subset of the Cocoa APIs. This means a fair amount of the OS X specific code might have to be rewritten

- It is not at all clear that the iPhone has a complete OpenGL implementation, or even any OpenGL at all. If this is missing it would be a significant challenge. Let's hope the iPhone comes with a complete and highly optimized OpenGL library.

Anyway, as you set, it would be cool to see Torque on the iPhone.