jpct-ae for iOS

[jackjia]

Hi Egon,

Google recently published a Java to Objective C translation tool: http://code.google.com/p/j2objc/
Do you think it is possible to port jpct-ae to iOS using the tool? By the way, I'm really thankful for your jpct-ae engine, it works great!

Best,
Jack

[K24A3]

"J2ObjC does not provide any sort of platform-independent UI toolkit, nor are there any plans to do so in the future. iOS UI code needs to be written in Objective-C or Objective-C++ using Apple's iOS SDK (Android UIs using Android's API, web app UIs using GWT, etc.)."

..which means it would be a big job converting jPCT to iOS. I think Egon has enough on his plate

[jackjia]

I did lots of android and ios coding so I know the UI stuff is easy; especially for game engine that is only a tiny part. The engine itself and opengl etc are the concerns.

[EgonOlsen]

OpenGL is a concern as well as the Bitmap/Drawable stuff for texture uploads and file access for textures and shaders. I don't thinkt that this project is mature enough to bother with it, nor do i own anything from Apple nor do i want to ATM...

[jackjia]

The physics and geometry stuff should be similar though, and the structure and overall design is transferable too. Lots of iOS coding is probably needed and some iOS libraries needs to be plugged in etc. The benefit would be the games that are using jpct-ae then could be  ported easily to iOS. This is just a wild idea. Of course you don't own anybody, and we all own you for jpct. 

[K24A3]

It's not just the iOS API and OpenGL adaption, the quality of J2ObjC's code conversion is in question as well so the conversion may introduce many problems that may be difficult and tiresome to track down. Plus any future changes done in jPCT-AE would need to be duplicated in jPCT-iOS, tested, patched, etc..

I mean it would be nice having an iOS version but I've had to convert a large amount of code from one platform to another (C++ MFC to C# .NET) and was something that introduced a lot hair pulling and headaches :p

[jackjia]

Agree with you - it won't be easy. Maybe easier than rewrite but it's hard to tell. Objective c is such a flexible language (doesn't necessarily mean it is better), it has a lot ammunition to express Java, so J2ObjC should be OK if they did it right - but honestly I haven't tried it yet. :-) Ok, maybe this is a bad idea.