Yep it has been discussed before (I've looked at it in the past). The short answer is no.. the long answer is nooooooooooooooo.

I don't think the iOS platform has the capacity or is suitable to hold the entire pioneer world in it (limited by application memory). I also don't think the user inter will translate very well with Cocoa Touch (you have 3 axis for steering, 3 axis for propulsion), not to mention all the other keys.

If there was a 'pioneer space sim' for iOS, it would be a very different game to the desktop version.

You are welcome to give it a go though (and I wish you lots of luck!)

Perhaps you might be better off trying to get the original Frontier to work or even GLFrontier?

Funny you should mention this, I've tried to get the original frontier working on android. The problem were the controls. I'd imagine it'd be quite easy to play using todays touch screens (same as mouse controls). And the way phones are going they'd easily handle pioneer. It's perfectly addictive and that's what you need for a phone game! The problem is if it's worth the effort for the code bods!

Anyway, shove this up your mind...

I have Frontier running thru iDOS (was lucky enough to download this) on my iPhone with customized rig of the 8 touch buttons iDOS let's you program.

Works a treat and has been a great game to play in hand held format!

It's made me love Frontier even more than I did.

Damn you Braben for forsaking your creation

Oh I have Frontier on my phone, not thats its playable or anything though.. It's purely nostalgic. 🙂

I can't get FFE to work though.

Personally I think Pioneer on a mobile platform is a possibility, however like Phil mentioned there are memory constraints which would mean a lot of work would be involved downgrading the resource intensive parts of pioneer, which is pretty much just the planets and stars.

They would be unrecognisable compared to their counterparts in the proper game.

I see the most likely option being a suplement to the real game, which contains the galaxy and plantary/trade information, but you can't fly around and land on planets.

But thats up ot whoever codes it.. If indeed anyone does 🙂

Drifter the closest game to Pioneer on the Iphone and after a successful Kickstart it on the way to pc/mac.

http://www.celsiusgs.com/blog/

Is there an Amiga emulator for the Iphone? If so perhaps the CD32 version of Frontier might work as it was modded to use the CD32 controller.

I've been holding off posting on this but I've got some thoughts on it.

I currently have 3 devices on my desktop for mobile development.

1) single core 1.5GHz, 512MB tablet with Mali 400 GPU can run OpenGL ES 2.0

2) dual core 1.2GHz, 768MB Samsung S2 with Mali 400 GPU can run OpenGL ES 2.0

2) dual core 1.0GHz, 1GB Motorola Atrix with Tegra 2 GPU can run OpenGL ES 2.0

Any of these things can technically run our game. Hell according to the polls I've done on this forum the GPUs in them are more powerful than a lot of peoples laptops GPUs! 😀

The main problem as stated is the interface, flight controls and everything else that is so mouse centric.

Maybe that could be fixed and support for something like the iControlPad http://www.icontrolpad.com/ would fix a lot more of the problems.

As for doing the porting itself. Well for my job we use the Marmalade SDK (formerly Airplay SDK) https://www.madewithmarmalade.com/ that lets you write cross platform C++ code. However you do need to pay for it after the 3 month trial licence expires. You'd need to port the rendering to OpenGL ES 1.1 or 2.0 which means fixed point values for the geometry. There's a lot less ram available for textures too.

Also I don't know why but audio support of mobile phones is completely fucking awful. I mean truly. Audio is always treated like the red haired bastard stepchild but seriously I'd rather phones just didn't make any sound rather than the piss poor functionality that you do get.

It would in short be a port and there'd be a fair amount of work, but it's not impossible at all, there are just some caveats to keep in mind 🙂

So can it be done? Yes.

Will it be done? ... only if you feel like doing it. 😮

Andy

Just to reiterate: Frontier is completely playable on iPhone under iDOS!!!

I jumped to Sol from Tau Ceti once only to realised I'd forgotten to buy an autopilot.. flew manual all the way in and landed at Apollonius City.... On a freakin iPhone!!!

😀

Do we know if Drifter does seamless planetary landings or is it another never actually land on a planet game?

It's hard to tell from the teaser video alone, but judging from the apparent size similarity between a planet and its moon, the scale is nowhere near accurate enough for planetary landings to be a feasible feature. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but the player ship seems stuck on a two-dimensional plane of movement.