Topic: AGS Engine iOS Port - jailbroken question

[sonneveld]

G'day,

Quick question, does anyone use the iOS port of the AGS engine for jail broken iOS devices or do are people only interested in it for publishing their own games on the App store? 

I only ask because running on jail broken devices doesn't exactly interest me and I'd rather refactor the iOS port to be a library that people that use to make their own publishable games. (much like VLC's VLCKit)  This would be a departure from the Android and PSP ports as they let you run any game but I think the Apple App Store restrictions limit our options here.

Thoughts?

[Crimson Wizard]

Would it be too much work to keep both ports?
One for publishing games, and another for running any other game.

[sonneveld]

I think the problem is that 1) I have no easy way to test the jailbroken ports since I have no interest in jailbreaking my devices and 2) I think the ways compiling jailbroken apps in XCode changes from version to version which will be tricky to keep up to date. 

Actually it might work better to move most of the code into an "AGSKit" library so interested parties could write their jailbroken version.  The Android port actually has already been split out in a similar fashion.

[Crimson Wizard]

What changes will that require to the engine itself?

[sonneveld]

Hopefully no more than what's already there.  There's already objective c code that wraps the engine to create an app.

[Monsieur OUXX]

Janet advocated against trying to release games on jailbroken iOS in her article (see a few threads before this one)

[Crimson Wizard]

Janet advocated against trying to release games on jailbroken iOS in her article (see a few threads before this one)

What about games that were never released for iOS? You will have to use jailbroken device to run them.
The question is basically, whether there are a lot of people who are interested in running any (even very old) AGS games on iOS.

[sonneveld]

What about games that were never released for iOS? You will have to use jailbroken device to run them.
The question is basically, whether there are a lot of people who are interested in running any (even very old) AGS games on iOS.

Exactly.  Although maybe we could put up curated bundles of games on the app store?

But so far there seems to be zero interest in running on a jailbroken device and more interest in selling AGS games in the store. The current iOS port is written from the perspective of a jailbroken iOS and is currently unmaintained.  I have no idea if it actually would work on a current jailbroken device.  Janet's researched the changes necessary for it to run individual games on a normal device.  Those changes should probably be put back into AGS mainline.

[JanetC]

As I understand it, iOS devices are getting harder and harder to jailbreak. Is anyone using the jailbroken version of AGS right now?