Got Android?

[mastermindg]

I just rooted my Droid the other day and have been playing with some features. I built the SDK with Eclipse and it's got me thinking....

It wouldn't be that difficult to port Forge over to Android. I'm just throwing this out there. I'll do some more research on my end.

[Rob Cashwalker]

There's a good chance that the advanced GUI stuff won't translate. Then there's the fact that unless you're running an actual Motorola Droid X, with a 1 GHz processor, Forge will perform so horribly you'd have to wait forever for the AI to return priority.

[slapshot5]

I was just thinking about this the other day. How much fun would that be to play Forge on the phone instead of listening to a boring speaker? Lots.

But then the UI... How do you best use screen real-estate to display the state of a MTG game?

Is there currently a MTG game for Android/iWhatever that we could model a GUI after?

(I don't actually know anything about programming for mobile platforms. yet.)

-slapshot5

[silly freak]

I have an android phone (HTC Desire), and actually did a small program (Game of Life) as a demo for myself. The application wasn't too hard to port, but only because logic and UI were properly separated, so I had to rewrite the GUI with google's widget system, and that was it.

I'm not at all sure if forge's GUI could be removed without taking some logic with it, so chances are that it's not possible, even with a usable GUI design.

A major point for such a GUI would be scrolling. one approach is to have a regular game table and do the usual slide and zoom operations, the other is to massively stack cards and flip through them

[friarsol]

Master lemme know if you get anywhere in this. I'd love to see Forge bridge into a mobile environment.

[vermpat]

Hi all,

I'm completely new at this forum, but i've been playing with the idea of writing an android game for MTG.

Instead of completely starting anew i decided to first look around what is available. there are no MTG games available for android(yet).
Forge does look like it could be ported so i am willing to go and give it a try. i've downloaded the code from the svn and will look into it as soon as i can.

As a response to the question about the screen estate, i think the best solution is an automatic scrolling screen (if it is your turn it shows your cards, if it is the opponents turn it shows their cards, for battle phase just show the creature cards, etc. etc.). What do you guys think of this?

vermpat

[friarsol]

If you need any help filtering through things let me know. At this point I know there are some game logic that exist in the UI that should be pulled out.

I think as long as you can shift around between Zones and quickly see your hand I think the screen real estate issue won't be a major problem.

[DennisBergkamp]

I think Forge would look and work amazing on a Motorola Xoom
The trickiest part would be screen estate issues for low res phones. I'm not sure if autoscrolling would be the answer (since oftentimes you're targeting your opponents' permanents anyway). My recommendation would be to look at how Wagic handles it (no need for a PSP, there's a windows version also : http://wololo.net/wagic/download ).

[vermpat]

Ah ok, ill take a look into that as well..
At the moment i only own and advent vega android tablet (10.2 inch) so i will not be having any screen size problems:P
I will however try to port it in a way that you can also use it on smaller devices.
I didn't expect such a fast response on a thread that was this old
Once again thanks, ill first look into the code and make some sense out of it for myself.

vermpat

[slapshot5]

I didn't expect such a fast response on a thread that was this old
Once again thanks, ill first look into the code and make some sense out of it for myself.

I think we're all very excited about it, we just don't know how to do it ourselves.

Glad to hear someone's looking into it!

-slapshot5

[Rob Cashwalker]

Since the thread began, my company switched from blackberry to droids. I've got a Droid 2 Global, and the rest of the company got the Droid X. I've also played with the SDK, which is just a plugin to eclipse.

The GUI API for android is really difficult to work with. Everything uses Layout Managers. All components must be declared in XML files, I don't think you can create a GUI object on the fly.

[frwololo]

I'm hijacking one of your threads again guys (on top of necroposting, apologies for that).
We are actively working on an Android port of Wagic and are always looking for devs.

When I initially worked on Wagic, my goal was to port forge to the PSP. The code of Forge at the time was unfortunately extremely heavy (CPU intensive), and the gui was not adapted to small screens at all, so I gave up and instead started my own project.

If Forge is to ever be ported to android, there must be an extremely strong separation between the GUI and the logic.
I'm not too worried about the engine being heavy, nowadays' androids have enough CPU.

So, Porting Forge to android would be doable I believe.

That being said, we're so close with Wagic that I would love to get help rather than see the two projects fight on that platform (haha, I know none of you guys will buy this, we all love the project we spent years on, perfectly human feeling )

anyways:

As you can see the port is technically ready, but we're hit by the Paretto rule: the remaining 20% of the work is taking most of the time. Controls need to be improved for small screen, etc...

[Hellfish]

Now that's just plain cool!
The controls didn't look near as finicky as I thought they would be,either.

[Rob Cashwalker]

{Ron Simmons from WWE}DAMN!{/Ron Simmons from WWE}



Is it compiled to be compatible with phone size or tablet size only?

[DennisBergkamp]

Wow, very cool!!!!