GeneRally International Forum

I'm just curious about how much will it cost to make GeneRally for iPhone or if is it even possible. Thank you for answer.

Two words:
Not possible.

It would be possible, but only with a total reprogramming of the entire setup

Exactly. I mean if they can get a cut down version of F1 2009 in iPhone then GR would be a snap.

Alex wrote:Exactly. I mean if they can get a cut down version of F1 2009 in iPhone then GR would be a snap.

I doubt that F1 2009 for iPhone is at all related to the larger console version in terms of code. It might share a couple of programming techniques or something, but I don't think that they ported the original version the iPhone.

You really think this is less advanced than GR? And notice how i said cut -down version.

can you tell me, what are dimensions of its display in mm, please? The diagonal is 9 cm (3.5 inches), ratio 3:2, but already forgot all math.

That's what Wikipedia is for it's an 8.9 cm diagonal screen, with a 480x320 resolution for the first 3 generations, the new one has a 960x640 resolution. All the phones are between 115 and 115.5 mm in length (not the screen), and 58.6-62mm wide (again, not the screen)

The major issue would be that you'd need a unique version for each iPhone I would guess, due to the differing hardware.

Alex wrote:You really think this is less advanced than GR? And notice how i said cut -down version.

That was made by a large team with many months development time and significant funding. GR is made by 2(?) people, with no funding, and we all hope that new updates will come out soon!

So, if on 15 inch screen the car has about 1 cm (on WS 180 track), how big it would be on 3,5 inch screen? GR, as it is, is IMHO completely unsuitable for mobile phones unless James with Markku would completely rework its concept of a phone version, which would effectively mean developing 2nd game. I think, that it doesn't worth for all the time needed for it, I would be happy enough with just finding time to give us option to play GR once on consoles (e.g. Wii, PSx) or at least on Linux and Mac OS systems.

That's a fair call, although I'm dubious about Wii support - that would also require a massive rewrite, or is there an old-school controller for a Wii? Certainly PlayStation 2/3 support (not sure if PS1s would have the hardware, they might do but would require a larger rewrite than a PS2/3 version), XBox/XBox 360 and possibly Gamecube for any die-hard GC fan.

Alex wrote:You really think this is less advanced than GR? And notice how i said cut -down version.

iOS games like this have nothing to do with their bigger brothers, they are in no way "cut down", they are specially programmed from scratch. Quite a difference.

Alonsomania is correct, hence why I said totally reprogrammed. GeneRally could NOT be cut down as it is designed for x86 and Windows, not iOS and ARM.

Lukeno94 wrote:That's a fair call, although I'm dubious about Wii support ....

I completely agree, I have very big doubts, that it would be possible for consoles, I just meant it in a sense, that if any reprogramming effort, I would prefer to see it in this way, where you can apply the game without major concept changes - it would ''stay GR'' like we know it and would be be working (will be playable) - not like the effort for mobiles, which would be totally unplayable or completely different game loosely reminding GR.

Alex wrote:You really think this is less advanced than GR? And notice how i said cut -down version.

No one actually stated that it would be less advanced...

Like Lukeno94 said, it would propably be possible to do the port for phones, but it would require a complete rework on the code. The reason is, that the different OS' of the phones are using different programming languages than what the game is originally coded on. I guess GR is now ported to C# as it needs the visual studio DLLs. This means that the only phone OS that the port should be at least somehow easy is Windows7 phones. They use the same .net framework.
C# is based on Java and C++.
Then, iPhone that was requested. iPhone uses Objective-C, which is based on C. Objective-C uses the Cocoa framework. Now here is the first big problem. Changing from a framework to another isn't just the case of using a different library. This would mean (in minimum) changing every command on the code. And even at this point the game would very likely not even start, since the different frameworks would very likely need a different kind of approach on the code so the game would use them correctly.
And even at this point, if all of this stuff was made perfectly, the game might still not work properly, since some stuff just doesn't work that simply on other languages than it does on others.
Android phones use Java, so it might be a bit easier to port the game on those phones than iPhone, but it would still require quite a lot of work.

So in short, technically it would be possible, but with the current team it would be practically impossible. (Unless of course some of the current programmers are also used to coding for phones..)

Thank you guys for your opinions. It would be great if you could play it on mobile devices but that's not gonna happen probably anytime soon