IPhone Support Coming To Torque

#1 I hate it when the community is the last to know about stuff.

I understand how it happens, press release goes out, sites in earlier time zones report on it before the sun breaks over the mountains in Eugene. Still, it's mildly annoying.

Great news on the iPhone support though.

#2 Wow! That's pretty awesome... I was thinking about getting one of these for my wife soon.

#3 The announcement's definitely coming.

My wife and I are loving our iPhone's. It'd definitely be cool to see some Torque Projects on it.

#4 Just be sure not to share any ideas related to or even discuss about iPhone SDKs: SlashDot -- Inside Apple's iPhone SDK Gag Order. :(

#5 Torque for Iphone! Wow! awesome!

#6 Wow. Why do they even bother to make the SDK publicly available then if no one can share or discuss anything on it?

#7 www.garagegames.com/products/torque/iPhone

#8 I wonder how long it'll take me to save up for a Mac? ;-p

Good news all around! Except for the gag order business.. seems a bit lame to me. :-/

#9 So is that "really" marble blast and the PSK running on an iPhone or is that a photoshop mockup of what it hypothetically looks like?

Not to say it doesn't look pretty sweet, I'm just really curious if its already running...

#10 Ok! This is unfair! I suggested this when the iPhone SDK first released!

#11 Personally, I don't see how this will work to any decent degree. Yeah, you might be able to get some of those games onto the iPhone, but how exactly are you supposed to map the controls? Given that even simple NES emulation with onscreen controls was shown to have input latency large enough to make the NES games unplayable, it seems to me that having a much more intensive game running would only exacerbate the problem.

Having to "gesture" on the main game area seems pretty undesirable to me.

Might be good for casual/puzzle type games though. I doubt platformers or any sort of action game would be very playable, however.

#12 I think the iPhone is one of the most exciting developments for "indie" game developers in a long, long, long time.

consider the platform:

* it's mobile
* it's got accelerometers
* it's got GPS
* it's got bluetooth
* it's got the whole internet for gosh sakes
* it's only $200
* the SDK is easy to get
* it's got a little bit of horsepower
and now
* it has the well-known TGE and TGB engines

seriously: indie developers! if you are not losing sleep because you're too busy dreaming up creative new ways to use this amazingly rich and cheap platform, you should turn in your indie developer card.

#13 Well said Orion..I am having significant trouble concentrating on coding now!

Ross, the Nintendo DS does a lot of gesture interfaces, and its really quite suitable in some games.

#14 @Dave, yeah, but the DS doesn't typically use the input touch screen as the main game screen (some do, but these usually make sense...the Kirby games for instance), it also has a dpad and several buttons. So it's not the same thing at all. My point isn't that gesture control isn't good enough, it's that gesturing on top of the main game display area is undesirable by definition. When you're trying to control something, you don't want that something blocked from view by your fingers. That's the whole point of the DS in fact.

@Orion, it isn't really that cheap O_o. It's $200 + ($70 x 24 = $1680) = $1880. To get the $200 price, you are *required* to pay the $70 (minimum) contract for two years. I'm sure there are fees on top of that that I don't even know about. On the other hand, you can pick one up without the contract for a mere $700-$1000 or so. An interesting and cool device it may be, but cheap it most certainly isn't by any stretch of the imagination.

#15 Brett's Blog on the iPhone SDK

@Ross
It really depends on the type of game that you're doing.

I could see MB working well with the motion tech, though I hope it would be more refined that Super Monkey Ball.

I could also see a RPG (Vay is fun for older-schoolers) that uses gestures to attack groups, thrust, slash, etc or targeting specific areas.

But, yeah...tapping the crosshairs to shoot in a FPS wouldn't be much fun.

#16 @David, yeah I agree with that. Certain games could work well. Some action games that can map directly to the motion sensor might work (like MB as you note*). I just don't see anything beyond turn based or casual/puzzle sort of games working well with the total lack of input controls the iPhone sports. You could potentially shrink the rendered area to give you some room for controls on the sides, but as I noted, they couldn't even get touch input to have decent latency for NES emulation, which is significantly less intensive than Torque in general, and Torque games in specific.


* - Though I'm not sure exactly how you're supposed to control the camera, and the powerups and the blast? There's more to MB than just MonkeyBall, after all. Camera control is a big factor, and if you're having to tilt the iPhone around to play(which almost by definition requires two hands, esp. if you're supposed to also be using the iPhone's button on the left), I doubt you're also going to want to be sliding your finger around the screen to control the camera, while also trying to see what's actually going on.

#17 Yeah, camera control on MB as well as kicking the powerups into action would definitely be an interesting problem to try to solve, and in the end might not be worth solving at the expense of the title.

I'd love to see a Trauma Center game on the iPhone, RPG's and other adventure games.

#18 Question about the accelerometers:
if i put an iPhone on a table, tell it "you're on the table", then walk across the room with it and back,
will it know that it's back on the table ?

#19 Some RPGs/adventure games could be cool. I still think the prohibitive expense of the iPhone is going to hamper this unnecessarily, though. I could easily build a very nice desktop PC for the $1000-2000 it would cost to get an iPhone. This is also less interesting to me personally than, say, the Xbox 360 community games setup (which is both less expensive*, more open**, and has better dev tools***).


* - 360 is $300, plus $50-100 for when you want to publish to Xbox Live. iPhone is $1000 for a non-contract one, or $2000 ($1880, plus whatever extra fees/taxes AT&T imposes, which are most likely incredibly abundant).

** - The Game Studio Express stuff/Torque X are free and directly available, while the iPhone version of Torque is "per game basis" and thus not open at all, not to mention the draconian SDK agreements of the iPhone (i.e., as posted on the Slashdot story above).

*** - Pretty much industry wide standard tools (Visual Studio) from MS for free, vs. whatever junk is in the Apple SDKs (who knows, since everyone is forbidden from discussion of what you get...though we know you get a simulator).


Edit: @Orion, possibly, but it's not that straight forward. It's not "location aware" if that's what you're wondering. However, you could write software to track the state of acceleration over time and determine that its position is roughly back in the same spot. I doubt it would work very well. I don't think the iPhone has all three axes, and I'm not sure it has any gyrometers (ala the Wiimote, which even given the fact that it does have XYZ translation and rotation isn't able to accurately track its position/rotation over time, which is why they came out with the "motion plus" accessory thing).

#20 Thanks for the 411 ross.
yeah, i think you need 6 linear accelerometers to successfully track [relative] position & orientation,
and then of course you're subject to their accuracy.