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Old 08-19-2007, 01:23 PM   #41
shadowfyr
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Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 310
shadowfyr will become famous soon enough
Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

Actually, I imagine the experience of trying to run a game on a PDA and cringe. First, the screens are small enough that its not practical to provide 80 columns of text, any less of which is imho not optimal for playing a text game. Second, because of the screen size, graphics is actually probably easier to deal with. Third, unless its one of the newer phones, with complete keyboards, commands in games are often screwy enough that even the "guess what I am trying to type" system texters use isn't going to be that useful. And finally... Until there is some standardization in those devices, in both the file systems, APIs and code execution (which ain't likely to happen), there is no certainty at all that coding something that will run on a Palm, for example, will also run on a Nokia phone, or a Motorola, or what ever. You might manage to get the same language on the phone, only to find that the critical socket protocols are not accessable from *that* language. As someone that has tried to just code a simple calculation program to figure out what I have to charge + the broker fee, to match the current prices on the markets and EQII, and couldn't bloody find anything which didn't have an endless list of stupid limitations to it to do that, trying to code a web app for one gives me hives. lol But heh, good luck with that.
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