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I know you said NOT to post suggestions that were already very common occurrences, but I had to ask: Why not make a mobile version of Mine-imator? Or a Mac/Linux/IOS version too. I mean like duh people have suggested it, but if its been suggested a bunch then can you tell us why you won't add it? There's literally only two common suggestions you explained which were IK and Extrusion: Both were software-related based on what the program already used or what the maximum power was of the program.

Here's a simple question that requires from a single word of godlike wisdom to several words of beautiful intellect: What makes bringing Mine-imator to a different platform so difficult?

And before you go and say... 

"It's very hard to make a Windows program into a Mac/Linux/IOS/Android/Anything-Besides-Windows Program because you have to change every single damn piece of coding to be compatible to instead of a Windows program to a Mac/Linux/IOS/Android/Anything-Besides-Windows Program"  - Your Average Common Sense Know-It-All

...keep in mind that I, as well as many of others, basically predicted you were going to say that, one.

And two, I'm not asking technologically how hard it is to do so but instead the actually capabilities of different platforms. (Mac/Linux have different desktop screens and controls, IOS/Android use touch screen controls on a small-medium sized "mouse-pad", etc)

Edited by GryphonKingBros
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Cell phones aren't powerful enough, even if we could port it. If MI has a hard time running sometimes on 4GB of RAM, an average cell phone of just 3GB and minimal processing power will really suffer.

And GameMaker (the program MI is written in) doesn't have tools that allow you to easily port something to a different platform, especially the way David wrote the program in GameMaker. He wrote the entire program in one instance, instead of how GameMaker encourages with multiple parts compiling together, which isn't how GameMaker looks at things when converting to a different platform (at least from my knowledge - I may be wrong).

18 minutes ago, GryphonKingBros said:

And before you go and say... 

"It's very hard to make a Windows program into a Mac/Linux/IOS/Android/Anything-Besides-Windows Program because you have to change every single damn piece of coding to be compatible to instead of a Windows program to a Mac/Linux/IOS/Android/Anything-Besides-Windows Program"  - Your Average Common Sense Know-It-All

...keep in mind that I, as well as many of others, basically predicted you were going to say that, one.

Okay...? Why is it wrong...?

Mine-imator is written in C++ (if I remember correctly), which Mac doesn't really play well with. Plus, it actually relies on C++ framework that only Windows has.

Mac also just calls different functions differently than Windows. People who haven't developed for Mac often have a hard time converting.

 

You could try Wine though; I hear that works. It gets updated all the time and has been reliable in my past experiences. Just haven't tried it for Mine-imator.

Edited by Colonel Muffin
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It just difficult and it doesn't work that well. One user managed to port Mine-Imator to Mac and it still isn't perfect, by a long shot. 

And who would be crazy enough to use MI on their phone? Can you imagine how uneffecient, frustrating, limited and timewasting it would be? Let's not forget the render times on all those platforms you mentioned. Mine-Imator is not just a cheap cute little program that is easily accesible, it can be quite a powerful tool indeed and as such you can't run it efficiently on those platforms. I'm completely sure that its not that the developers are just lazy and can't port the program, its just not really worth the time and effort.

If it were that easy to do this, then it would have been done a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time ago. But it hasn't. Why do you think this thing that has been suggested to death is not implemented yet? Its just not really worth it.

 

TL;DR: Unefficient and not worth it.

Edited by -StickyMations-
All of this, is, of course, all I know of.
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23 hours ago, GryphonKingBros said:

Here's a simple question that requires from a single word of godlike wisdom to several words of beautiful intellect: What makes bringing Mine-imator to a different platform so difficult?

A mobile version will require the entire UI to be reworked and simplified to fit onto a small screen, and the graphics would need to be limited to be able to run smoothly on mobile hardware. The resulting Mine-imator Mobile would be nothing like the Desktop counterpart, and a total remake doesn't seem realistic for a project like this with only 1-2 developers who all work in their spare time.

A Mac/Linux port is certainly possible to make, but since I've moved on to other projects at this point it's up to future developers to tackle this task.

Basically, the Mine-imator code is split into three parts, with varying degrees of difficulty in porting:

  1. GameMaker: Studio/GML codebase. Relatively easy to port, with only a few hassles since a couple of the built-in GameMaker functions used are Windows-only. They need to be replaced with C++ code.
  2. C++ extensions. Used to add features that are unavailable in GameMaker, including file operations, movie exporting and a few window functions. These will be trickier to port, but not impossible since C++ is an universal language for all platforms. It's just a matter of getting the libraries to compile in other environments, mostly.
  3. World Importer C# code. Will need to be ported to a cross-platform engine for C# such as Mono, unknown difficulty.

To top it all off, the developers will need access to a machine with Mac/Linux. Developing/testing in a VM doesn't sound optimal.

@Nimi, get to it :) 

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On 2/8/2018 at 12:18 PM, david said:

A mobile version will require the entire UI to be reworked and simplified to fit onto a small screen, and the graphics would need to be limited to be able to run smoothly on mobile hardware. The resulting Mine-imator Mobile would be nothing like the Desktop counterpart, and a total remake doesn't seem realistic for a project like this with only 1-2 developers who all work in their spare time.

A Mac/Linux port is certainly possible to make, but since I've moved on to other projects at this point it's up to future developers to tackle this task.

Basically, the Mine-imator code is split into three parts...

...To top it all off, the developers will need access to a machine with Mac/Linux. Developing/testing in a VM doesn't sound optimal.

Thanks for explaining in depth about the specifics about the coding required to port one to the other, David. (and also thx for noticing my discussion) However, not to be disrespectful, but I still really wasn't too concerned about porting. I really just wanted to know what features would be diverse and/or varied if you and your team we're to pull Mine-imator onto mobile or Mac or Linux, etc.

On 2/7/2018 at 12:40 PM, GryphonKingBros said:

I'm not asking technologically how hard it is to do so but instead the actually capabilities of different platforms. (Mac/Linux have different desktop screens and controls, IOS/Android use touch screen controls on a small-medium sized "mouse-pad", etc)

Again, I do appreciate you taking the time to reply onto this topic, but that's not what I was asking...

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31 minutes ago, GryphonKingBros said:

Thanks for explaining in depth about the specifics about the coding required to port one to the other, David. (and also thx for noticing my discussion) However, not to be disrespectful, but I still really wasn't too concerned about porting. I really just wanted to know what features would be diverse and/or varied if you and your team we're to pull Mine-imator onto mobile or Mac or Linux, etc.

Again, I do appreciate you taking the time to reply onto this topic, but that's not what I was asking...

Ah.

Well, Mac/Linux doesn't differ in any major ways from Windows when it comes to the desktop. The largest differences, as said, would be in the jump between Desktop and Mobile. They would turn out to be entirely different programs, in fact. Of course this is all hypothetical but it's usually the way things go when comparing other apps between platforms.

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22 hours ago, david said:

Well, Mac/Linux doesn't differ in any major ways from Windows when it comes to the desktop. The largest differences, as said, would be in the jump between Desktop and Mobile. They would turn out to be entirely different programs, in fact. Of course this is all hypothetical but it's usually the way things go when comparing other apps between platforms.

With mobile, yes, using a small cellphone would be very different to using a PC. Using a small insignificant touch screen would be extremely frustrating to impossible to animate with. Accuracy would be lower since with even the current program if your at an abnormal position with the axis's your actions fly out of control so just imagine what a large cursor would do. Running the program would be laggy; How would you render it; And on and on...

A mobile version of Mine-imator on a phone is impossible. What about a tablet? I did start the discussion with mobile referring to a cellular device, but a tablet is more or less a possibility.

Granted, I'm making this discussion go much longer than it needs to be xD

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