Touch devices

[piranha]

We have implemented code in 0.91 that makes it possible to play the game on phones and pads. Drag now works on the maps and on items and fight orders.
However it requires a lot of CPU. From some testing we've seen these results.
iPhone 4S = playable for someone who already know warbarons but to lagy to be interesting for new players.
iPhone 5 = playable, no real problem. Could of course be faster.
Samsung galaxy S2 = Unplayable. Some desperate soul on a long trip can look around some.

We are currently looking at improving the draw engine probably by changing to a HTML5 canvas which is hardware accelerated by the GPU on newer browsers. Should make it playable on more machines but will probably still require a pretty powerful phone / pad.

[KGB]

Piranha,

It might be useful to add an option to turn off movement of units. In other words when you move units instead of showing the unit move to each square and the map unfog, just jump right to the final destination (whether that's end of moves or stopping when seeing units in FOW) and update the map for FOW. That should speed things up on slower PCs/Phones/Tablets.

Dragging the map of course is still going to be an issue but at least it might help some.

KGB

[Chazar]

Here is my experience on the Nexus10:

Landscape Mode: map view is only 9 tiles wide, 8 tiles high; overall unusable, since dialog boxes fill the entire screen and are difficult to dismiss (since the close button is oft screen and the dialog cannot be moved to make the button visible).

Portrait Mode: map view is 10 tiles wide, 21 tiles high; almost acceptable, but the tiles ought to be smaller, showing more tiles in total to ease map orientation. There is a lot of wasted space underneath the buttons on the right-hand side of the screen. Dialog boxes about half the screen width, i.e. having a perfectly fine size.

Dragging the maps works fine. With my ordinary setting (50 Battle Speed, 100 Move Speed), map movement skips animation for me (short distances: jumps to target; for long distances I see the unit jumping about half-way, and then to the target). Likewise, the battle jumps right to the result without animation for battles with few units (i.e. animation is skipped).

Overall, the game is certainly too sluggish to win over any new players for Warbarons on these devices, but it is fast enough for me to do a turn in games on small maps where I know very well what is going on and what I wanted to do.


However, there seems to be some weird bug: in one of my ongoing games on Rivalry, clicks are ignored: I cannot select units (but I can select and move them through the buttons on the right), and I cannot toggle the grid. Reloads did not fix it, and other games, even on big maps like Midgard, work fine for me on the Nexus10. I tried it several times, but that one game (39385) just won't work on my Nexus10 right now (on the PC everything is fine). Weird.