[SUGGESTION] iPadOS Support

I know, I know we've talked about mobile support in the past. The last thread was started in 2010, and nearly a decade later we've come a long long way with mobile technology. My iPad, even though I never thought I'd say it, is my go-to device when it comes to non-work things these days. I love my Linux compy but the iPad's battery life and convenience has really won me over. Now if only we could get Darkplaces + Xonotic running on iPadOS, submitted to the App Store (or even a 3rd party app store like builds.io).

I thought I would at least get the conversation started. I'm willing to contribute in any way I can.

Cheers,
Kev

Actually an interesting idea. But some problems here:
-devs' prorities (0.8.3) which are delayed for forever it feels *cough* (not really an active dev over here)
-maybe some legal issues with GPLv2 that also prevents it from being released on steam
-i guess steam would still have priority over this one

I guess the interest would be sufficient to talk about this when you actually get it compiled and working on ipad.

Actually an interesting idea. But some problems here:
-devs' prorities (0.8.3) which are delayed for forever it feels *cough* (not really an active dev over here)
-maybe some legal issues with GPLv2 that also prevents it from being released on steam
-i guess steam would still have priority over this one

I guess the interest would be sufficient to talk about this when you actually get it compiled and working on ipad.

Understandable that Steam support is a priority. I hope that happens as well. I dunno if GPL is an issue for Steam anymore, is it? Libretro/Retroarch have hit Steam recently.

I did see a Darkplaces for iOS README inside the Xonotic repo. I'd be curious if any of the devs have tried this. I'd be willing to donate a current iPad device for testing if that makes this a reality.

If anything is a priority, then it should be debian (and other distro) repos. Here's my position on steam: https://gitlab.com/xonotic/xonotic/issues/274 - spoiler alert - i am slightly against it.

You're of course welcome to try to port DP to any platform you wish, i am just gonna warn you DP is not exactly actively developed or maintained and it might take a while (years) to get your changes merged.

As for 0.8.3 - it's gonna happen when we figure some things out. At this point i don't think we even properly managed to mark the issues with the milestone. The biggestt issue afaik is that autobuilds don't work on some OSes and nobody who knows the build system has time right now.

Don't forget though that most decent servers run git so you're already getting the latest gameplay, just not models / sounds. The main benefit of a release is attracting players (which would surely be nice).

Darkplaces already has some code specifically for Android and iOS. However, nobody has touched that code for years. It's highly likely that this code doesn't work anymore.
If someone wanted to add support for mobile OSs to Xonotic, they also would need to think about user input as we can't expect users to have mouse and keyboard connected to mobile devices.
Another big problem would be deploying Xonotic to an iOS device. Afaik Apple locks down their mobile devices so that users can only install apps from their app store. Even if we ignore the time effort to package and publish Xonotic to the app store, Apple probably has a fee that devs need to pay to be allowed to publish their software there.
Afais, getting Xon on the apple app store will be even harder than getting it on steam.

Don't forget though that most decent servers run git so you're already getting the latest gameplay, just not models / sounds. The main benefit of a release is attracting players (which would surely be nice).

Is this really all the autobuilds has to offer? On win 10 (which i use) i have way worse performance than with the stable release (sound crackle and slowdowns when much is going on oddly without much of a fpsdrop) so i figured there must be many changes in the autobuild.

There have been some engine changes, though i think just small ones - you can compare the 0.8.2 tag with div0-stable. Also new models which are higher poly. And when playing locally, bot code is much slower (though better) than 0.8.2.

Not sure what you mean by sound crackle - there was an uninitialized read during startup that produces a nasty sound - should be fixed now. (Obligatory rant: this would have never happened in langs with proper static analysis. This 40 years old relic was designed by amateurs with 0 PLT knowledge and we need to get rid of is ASAP.)

Not sure what you mean by sound crackle

When a lot of action is going on (like 15+ players at once) the weapon sounds start to crackle or just sound really "slow".  Most of time it's the Vortex or the Electro which then sound kinda "fucked up" during a tense fight. That however doesn't happen on stable release on my end. Graphic updates don't seem to have much of an impact on performance though. I don't really know what is causing it and just switched back to stable because it doesn't seem to happen there.  It could be my setup though (gtx 1060, i5-4670). But i haven't really look into it besides of trying some different drivers.

You might wanna open an issue here and include this info plus your OS and which executable you're using. If it gets fixed, it'll take a long time because everyone is busy but finding the cause would be a start - it probably affects more people, maybe they have something in common.

If you want new models / sounds / gamelogic in local games without the issue, you can try replacing the engine in the autobuild with the one from 0.8.2, afaik it should work. Actually might be interesting to try either way - autobuild should have some new sounds, maybe they're the cause and not code changes.