I was reading the Wikipedia page today on Riven and I noticed that it was released on the Pocket PC. I'd completely forgotten. The game was ported by a company other than Cyan. Now what I'm really curious about is how the game played on the PPC, as I have not seen it in action myself. Is it a complete port? And by complete, I mean all the video, sound effects, everything. Also, Chogan mentioned that Apple would have to make a few changes in how the iPhone works in order to successfully port Riven to it. But, if they can do it on a PPC, then why not on the iPhone? What exactly is the problem?

thesaxmaniac wrote:

What exactly is the problem?

I can't speak for all the issues, but a huge factor in the iPhone Myst's filesize was the fact that every video needed to be rendered and displayed in full-screen, where in the original games, much of the magic came from the use of tiny video windows within the game screen. Presumably the PocketPC didn't have the restriction that iPhone currently has, that prevents the game from displaying a small video on a portion of the screen.

_________________
Now shut up and make it so you only have to jump once. (Spoilers)
Luig'Ahn KI: (need to update)

LuigiHann wrote:

thesaxmaniac wrote:

What exactly is the problem?

I can't speak for all the issues, but a huge factor in the iPhone Myst's filesize was the fact that every video needed to be rendered and displayed in full-screen, where in the original games, much of the magic came from the use of tiny video windows within the game screen. Presumably the PocketPC didn't have the restriction that iPhone currently has, that prevents the game from displaying a small video on a portion of the screen.

I just played through riven again, and the entire file size of the data is 2.73 gigs. I can see that rendering the videos would be a huge problem for the size because in Riven, everything that you use or press is a video, but I still don't see this as something that would "stop" them from making it for the iphone. I assume that one big problem though is having several videos play one right after the other without any loading, or having multiple videos play at the same time.

It's mostly that Myst is, by a huge margin, a much bigger file than any other game on the iPhone. If someone has an 8-gig iPhone, Myst by itself probably takes up around a tenth of the entire available storage space. Riven is, of course, several times larger than Myst. So unless Apple adapts their software limitations to allow for Cyan's use of mini-videos to save space, Riven would end up being way too big to be practical.

Also consider states where, say, there's a switch on one part of the screen and a video that plays on another. In the original Riven, they could just render that video once, and have the switch be an image overlay. On the iPhone, they'd have to render the whole video once for each possible state of the switch. Stuff like that.

Oh! And they mentioned with regards to linking panel videos, that videos on iPhone can't loop without a gap. Riven made a bit of use of looping videos too, I think.

But again, I'm just regurgitating stuff I read around here combined with my own conjecture. Somebody who knows more might post something more insightful.

_________________
Now shut up and make it so you only have to jump once. (Spoilers)
Luig'Ahn KI: (need to update)

And sometimes multiple videos have to be played at once in Riven. The iPhone can only do one, full-screen video.

_________________
URU blog | Archives of the Restoration

You have to love the irony of how this works on a Pocket PC but seems to be an up hill battle on an Apple product. I can just see the PC Guy laughing as the Mac Guy is scratching his head.

_________________
<--- MINE! The cones are your friends. Have you hugged a cone lately?
mtn'man KI# 66952 | Don't kick the cones, they have feelings too.
Owes andylegate a beer in the pub - patcher fixed!

Well, I'm not sure 'cause I've never seen the PocketPC port, but I thought I heard that it wasn't really a good port. The resolution is lower for one thing. We don't know what kind of sacrifices the developers of that port made to make it work. Of course that's not an option for Cyan, they want the best if they're doing the port themselves, as they should.

_________________
URU blog | Archives of the Restoration

_________________
MOUL Mod/Cyan Intern

mtn'man wrote:

You have to love the irony of how this works on a Pocket PC but seems to be an up hill battle on an Apple product. I can just see the PC Guy laughing as the Mac Guy is scratching his head.

Yes it is ironic. And yes, Riven made constant use of looping videos, for example, the spinning domes. And multiple videos playing at once. It seems that the creator of Quicktime has unfortunately made an extremely basic video player on the iPhone. Maybe 3.0 changes it? Otherwise, I hope that Apple decides to take Cyan's suggestions to heart.

http://www.mobiletechreview.com/games/myst.htm

In this review, the writer says that flash player for PPC was required to run myst. Maybe this is how Riven's videos ran fine on the PPC..not using Quicktime for PPC (does that even exist?) but using flash, which doesn't work on the iphone.

Ahhh. Another thing I don't get about the iPhone is lack of Flash (and it ain't just me). Hopefully support for that is working for some point in the future for a number of reasons.

_________________
<--- MINE! The cones are your friends. Have you hugged a cone lately?
mtn'man KI# 66952 | Don't kick the cones, they have feelings too.
Owes andylegate a beer in the pub - patcher fixed!

_________________
MOUL KI: 174162

mtn'man wrote:

Ahhh. Another thing I don't get about the iPhone is lack of Flash (and it ain't just me). Hopefully support for that is working for some point in the future for a number of reasons.

I believe that's just because Steve Jobs doesn't like Flash. It's certainly not because Adobe hasn't tried to get it there.

Although, I thought I read some news somewhere that Apple and Adobe are finally working together to make an iPhone version of Flash that both parties can be pleased with.

_________________

Cubkyle wrote:

Although, I thought I read some news somewhere that Apple and Adobe are finally working together to make an iPhone version of Flash that both parties can be pleased with.

Hopefully that will be the Verizon version.

_________________
<--- MINE! The cones are your friends. Have you hugged a cone lately?
mtn'man KI# 66952 | Don't kick the cones, they have feelings too.
Owes andylegate a beer in the pub - patcher fixed!

Cubkyle wrote:

I believe that's just because Steve Jobs doesn't like Flash. It's certainly not because Adobe hasn't tried to get it there.

The biggest problem with flash on the iPhone is that flash for OSX (which the iphone runs on) is a horrible program. It will often eat up 50-90% of your processing power (on a current machine mind you) simply to watch a video, or worse, display ads. Until Adobe can fix the memory and processing issues with flash for OSX there will never be a port of it to the iPhone, it simply doesn't have enough power to run flash in its current form.