Super Ultra Request: Windows Mobile Client

O

Opodomus

Dalayan Beginner
Did any of you read Inktank back in the day? They had a comic Angst Technology and in one particular comic one of the programmers had modified his cell phone to camp the ancient cyclops for him.

I now have a windows mobile phone with specs as good as the computer I owned when EQ first came out. An SoD client for windows mobile is very possible... in theory
 
2 things come to mind, playing any mmo with a keyboard that small would suck....and can you even hook up a mouse?
 
Touchpad PDA phone with a slide-out keyboard.
Hell, it's even a widescreen most of the time.


Worst part would be the UI. A special UI would need to be tailored that employs a large text window and large icons for class specific features (spell bar, hotkeys, pet window, etc.)

I can imagine a screen which the entire bottom 3rd is a single chat window containing only tells, say, group, raid and guild. And the rest of the screen occupied by minimalist icons.

I found that even with the smallest UI pieces possible (granted I wasn't removing all the pieces I could) it was hard to achieve a usable 640x480 client. It was better with the widescreen equiv though, so I am not ruling it out. It all depends on the size and resolution of the phones screen.
 
Check out these specs for HTC phones to be released this year:

http://www.mobilitydigest.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/htcdevicespecs.jpg

Some of them are out already. All have touch screens for a mouse, though right clicking is not simple (most apps have right click as touch and hold on my phone).

My phone is 640X480 with a slide out keyboard and typing is not too difficult. I can type at approximately 75% my desktop typing speed.

There are already some pretty impressive 3D games for mobile phones, though they are rare. Remember when iPhone came out someone got WoW to run on it (though crappily and after heavy hacking). The specs on these phone blow iPhone out of the water.
 
Also, you CAN hook up a mouse, but that would defeat the purpose of the mobility I think. The touchscreen would need to be used for a mouse. Also, most if not all HTC devices cleverly build a stylus into their devices that is held in place magnetically, so one could use that.

I can't speak for everyone, but I rarely need to type AND use the mouse. I use the mouse for memming spells, but all combat is done via hotkeys. I would have plenty of time to get and put back the stylus because for me all mouse work is done during "downtime" type events.
 
WoW never got ported to mobile phones, some guys just setup a way to view screen-scrapes on your phone and trigger macro's from your phone. You could probably do the same thing with with a VNC or Remote Desktop client for mobile phones. I don't think you could really describe the experience as playing, though you could probably fish or mine or something.

A client port would have to be basically a complete re-write. These phones use ARM processors and have completely different APIs. Also you'd have to rework all of the games assets to fit them on such a device (reduced number and detail of textures, probably consolidate many of the models used in the game).

Even if somebody wanted to and was able to write a client for SoD from scratch it would probably not be targeting mobile phones.
 
Actually it would be insanely difficult to port it over. Windows mobile uses an entirely different version of the windows kernal/api so you would have to reverse engineer all of the eqclient and port them to the CE kernal/api, I figure even with the source code for the client it would take at least 6 months if the eq client code is clean and well commented which I doubt it is.

The wow thing was done purely with something like pcanywhere which was very easy to port to a phone. I have used it to play games from away from my pc before and it would be the easy way to do it, it just lets you control your pc remotely and view your pcs screen while you work.

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Maethorr said:
Actually it would be insanely difficult to port it over. Windows mobile uses an entirely different version of the .net framework so you would have to reverse engineer all of the framework commands used by the eqclient and port them to the .net CE framework [...]
Click to expand...

The EQ client is not a .net app.
 
I used the wrong term when I said .net framework, I was writing that on no sleep for the past few days.

I meant they have a vastly different api and kernal and use different binaries and library's and the eqclient would need to be rewritten to use those instead of the windows ones or those ported over.

Now if you had a portable device with windows xp embedded the port would be very simple as it supports all the librarys and binaries of windows exp, phones dont usually ever ship with XPe but you could probably put it on a suffeciently powerful enough PDA you could get it to run.
 
Maethorr said:
The wow thing was done purely with something like pcanywhere which was very easy to port to a phone.
Click to expand...

Can't speak for the "sportier" type of smartphone, but I have successfully used a VNC client over a VPN connection to remotely administrate a PC from a Blackberry. I think that VNC (or PC anywhere, which I believe uses the VNC kernel) is going to be the limit, and even with the best compression don't expect this thing to haul any kind of ass whatsoever. So definitely no combat, just tradeskilling, specifically mining\fishing, where minimal keystrokes are needed.
 
I used the wrong term when I said .net framework, I was writing that on no sleep for the past few days.

I meant they have a vastly different api and kernal and use different binaries and library's and the eqclient would need to be rewritten to use those instead of the windows ones or those ported over.

Now if you had a portable device with windows xp embedded the port would be very simple as it supports all the librarys and binaries of windows exp, phones dont usually ever ship with XPe but you could probably put it on a suffeciently powerful enough PDA you could get it to run.
 
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