Okay, so I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the logistics of porting the tads vm to java to get it running on android. This is no small feat. Several have tried this before, and tads is kind of a beast.
My question is: is this even a good idea? I’ve done a lot of messing around with IF on my tablet, and the mobile experience leaves a lot to be desired. The webui works pretty well on my tablet, but I still miss having a good sized screen and keyboard.
On the e ink kindle, it is SLOW. Dog slow. And that’s not about to change anytime soon.
Not quite. You’d need to adapt some things to be suitable for Android. Like input, among other things, since out of the box, it only works with Android devices that have a keyboard.
You would get the VMs, but that doesn’t help you at all. The VM doesn’t let you actually play the game, because it has no output. It’s like an engine without the rest of the car around it. What you would need to do with Gargoyle is port its output layer to Android. You don’t need to port the VMs at all, they run as-is on Android.
May be offtopic, but I think the way to go on mobile (touch devices) is
to write against webui and modify the UI of the game in such a way so
that the lack of keyboard is not a problem.
One way of achieving this would be to create a separate “control”
window where all commands (e.g. “go east”) are displayed as links (or
buttons, etc.) which can be easily “clicked” on a touch device. When
clicked, a JS handler would send the command to the command window.
This list can be updated on every turn, if desired. This may make the
game a little too straightforward to play, but it would certainly go a
long way toward making the game more accessible (even on a desktop).
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