Hi. Last month there was an Apple Keynote where they announced that they are ditching Intel and even ditching x64 architecture totally. They are moving to their own processors based on ARM architecture. To make it short: This means that you will be able to run iOS apps on your Mac PCs (and laptops too). So naturally this brings few questions.
Will you add the ability to control the spaceship with the mouse on mobile? Because you see, in 2 years Apple no longer will use normal apps and move completely to apps that use ARM. On Apple platforms it will be a brand new feature, but on android there already is OTG mouse function. I even tested it in CI5, but it wasn’t what you would expect (I had to click the LMB and then drag the mouse with auto-shoot function which is pretty mediocre).
Second. There is a really popular piece of hardware that uses ARM and is really cheap to get. No, it’s not smartphone. It’s Raspberry Pi - and especially the newest model 4B which ranges in price from 35$ to 75$ and the only difference is amount of RAM. Of course it being ARM device it can pretty easily run android apps. You can attach to it touchscreen device, but it’s better with mouse and for that we need to have mouse support in CIU. Of course in mobile version when it finally releases. So it would be good to have a great mobile version which could be then used both on android and Raspberry pi devices (as you can expect they both use OpenGL and not so long ago they started to work on Vulkan API which I highly recommend checking out since it can be used to achieve better performance and battery savings, but beware of it because it can be painful to use).
I will try hard not to. Mouse input has a huge advantage over touch, and it would ruin leaderboards (even if they’re segregated by platform). Of course, if mouse support is transparent to the game (like your experience with CI5) then even that might not be an option. Will revisit this later.
I only have the bandwidth to deal with major platforms. If this Raspberry setup ever becomes popular, I’ll consider it.
Leaderboards are competitive, and people who play on mobile are in most cases considered casuals (and in the cases they aren’t, they would be playing on PC anyway).
I really hope this is not going to be the case. How are we going to sync progress between mobile and PC then?
I’ve seen several mobile game communities that talks about their game’s meta. Yes, they’re competitive enough that some consider a single second an inefficiency.
I was mostly directed towards games that have same editions on both mobile and PC. Of course there are games like Clash of Clans and Royale and other Supercell games but those are primarily mobile. Would you play competitive LoL on mobile if it were cross-device?
Comparing performance on desktop/mobile is a larger (and unsolved) issue. But I was talking about leaderboards in particular, in which case a simple fix would be that only missions flown exclusively on a single platform would count. So, for example, you wouldn’t be able to start a mission on desktop but finish it on mobile (if would only count for your career, but not for leaderboards)
I don’t understand why this would be needed if the leaderboards are synced between PC and mobile, and I don’t see a reason why they wouldn’t be synced (except technical issues). If we have mobile-only leaderboards, obviously stuff like emulators could easily exploit this with mouse support.
There is an advantage to playing on PC (due to mouse & keyboard, a larger screen, or just better performance). If you straight-up mix PC and mobile leaderboards, then it wouldn’t be fair. You can either split leaderboards, or you can make the mobile version easier(*) (but how much easier? You’re never going to make it 100% equivalent)
Assuming you split the leaderboards, to keep things fair you have to make sure that each leaderboards only contains missions flown 100% on that platform. That’s why you have to disqualify missions that were partially played on both.
iOS does. But it’s irrelevant, I’m just referring to the fact that the game is (if memory servers) 25% easier on mobile.
As I said, this is not a solved problem. PC has cheat engine and autoclickers, mobile has emulators and external mouse input. I don’t think we can win here
