Android Support

[francis247uk]

@BodbDearg Would you consider Android support at some point in the future, would love to be able to play this on the go!

[BodbDearg]

Hello @francis247uk thanks for the suggestion. I considered supporting mobile (iOS and Android) from the start but decided against it for a number of reasons:

(1) The controls. Playing a Doom style FPS on a touchscreen is a pretty miserable experience in my opinion, since the game was never designed with that consideration in mind. It just doesn't have the speed or accuracy required to make it enjoyable. It also becomes very uncomfortable holding the device for long periods of time and friction against the screen becomes bothersome too. It just doesn't feel like the experience on mobile would be good enough for me to invest time to support it; it would just be a small novelty that would soon be forgotten.
(2) App stores (Apple in particular) are somewhat hostile to reverse engineered projects and/or emulation. The app might not be approved, particularly on the Apple App Store.
(3) App stores are also incompatible with the GPL3 license, due to the restrictions they place on the end user and redistribution. I want PsyDoom to remain under this license since it helps guarantee that the source (and any derived projects) will remain free and open forever.
(4) Lesser reason: making the game data (i.e. the game disc images) available to the app would be somewhat awkward for the user on mobile devices, much more so than on a regular operating system. Getting up and running would be very cumbersome on these platforms, versus what users normally expect from other apps. Determined users of course could figure things out, but it just wouldn't be a very good experience overall.

[francis247uk]

Ah thanks for considering, agreed on the touch screen controls, I've been using a Samsung Galaxy phone with a physical Razr Kishi device and it plays great for emulators and games. Was thinking Psydoom would be great in a similar vein to Sonic 3 Air for android - in that it wouldn't be on the respective stores, you'd just download the .apk file to install it and then transfer over the rom file (disc file in Dooms case) so it wasn't breaking any copyright/license laws. But take your point, probably a fairly niche market!

[Dragonsbrethren]

Just going to throw in my support for an Android build. I just bought a Retroid Pocket, it's an Android handheld with a full dual analog controller. There are quite a few similar devices on the market that make the touch screen controls a non-issue.