Factorio for the iPad?

[ratchetfreak]

But game performance on apple hardware is bad. Their openGL support is several versions out of date they refuse to add Vulkan support and instead try to force Metal on everyone.

Maybe, maybe not., If others can cope with that, then the programmers of Factorio surely can as well.
Look at "Minecraft", "Civilization", "Grim Fandango" or even "Transitor" a extreme hungry graphic resource eater and normally keyboard dependent runs without hickup on any iPad or iPhone

I'd hardly call minecraft graphics intensive.

Looking at Transistor I very much doubt it is either. Those backgrounds are just quads with a transparent texture.

[brunzenstein]

I'd hardly call minecraft graphics intensive.

True enough - this was not the most clever example but the layouts minecraft is able to to stretch out are huge

Looking at Transistor I very much doubt it is either. Those backgrounds are just quads with a transparent texture.

Transistor is imho quite demanding.
Factorio uses a lot of sprites as well and they are (since the legendary Commodore 64 or even the Psion who could even handle them) an easy go for any platform today - even the Apple Watch could handle sprites that. Nobody insist the a porting of factorio to the iOS is a sleep walk but as Factorio's current Mac Version is performing like a breeze on my really vintage late 2008 Machbook - that could be done.
The new iPad's processors are a league more powerful today as my old MacBook thought.

To do it is a purely commercial decision - and after looking at that and raising the thumb the only remaining question of available man power only

[Zeblote]

Factorio graphics aren't intensive, but if you build a large factory you better have good single thread performance. I'd imagine the ipad has a crap cpu.

[brunzenstein]

Factorio graphics aren't intensive, but if you build a large factory you better have good single thread performance. I'd imagine the ipad has a crap cpu.

You better have a look as the powerful A9X processor Apple is using before you imagine something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9X
Actually Apple desingns the processor(s) themselves as of-the-rack cpu products are not good enough for them.
Not only therefor a iPad costs as much as a three "wall mart sales of the week" tablets.

[tigar]

- PC / Mac desktops in private use are soon being retried

Don't know where you got this from but it wont it seriously wont happen no matter how many people predict it

The need for a stationary device that doesn't need charging every 5-6 hours will always remain(even if battery technology allows us to go weeks without charging) for a simple few reasons
1. desktops will always be more powerful(except mac's)
2. due to their size they have more room in general to plug things into (usb ports? try fitting 32 usb ports on a phone/tablet)
3. there will always be programs that just wont run on mobile devices no matter what os they run(eg windows tablet still has issues running several office products due to driver issues or photoshop or something)
4. more graphical intense programs like say photoshop or blender or actual graphic intense games or movie editing/song editing the list goes on
5. the amount of storage space as well not everyone has fast internet/unlimited so a cloud based option isnt viable for everyone thus big external drives are needed for photo backups and such which require a laptop/desktop to access
6. media centers
7. watching a movie in private of your family(who wants to watch a beautiful movie on a 6 inch screen all the time?)

list goes on of reasons as to why it wouldn't to be honest

just figured id share some points anyway i do agree with the rest though ios support would boost sales

[ssilk]

Do you know Moores law?

Do you know that my iPhone has much more computer power than my PC 15 years ago? And I had a quite big machine.

Ok, it won't come in the next years, but let's wait 10.

[brunzenstein]

Ok, it won't come in the next years, but let's wait 10.

With all due respect Sir,
the problem seems to be solely on the side of man power (knowledgeable programmers) and well as programming platforms - surely not on the cpu performance. That a nowadays iPad CPU performance surely can handle a heavy sprite using game (a commodore C64 could handle similar maps and sprites - a relative simple task 20 years ago) like Factorio is seriously not be questioned.

[Zeblote]

Do you know Moores law?

It's not relevant, doesn't mean the processors are twice as fast, even if it was still true. All we've been getting the past years are tiny improvements over the last generation.

[orzelek]

Do you know Moores law?

It's not relevant, doesn't mean the processors are twice as fast, even if it was still true. All we've been getting the past years are tiny improvements over the last generation.

I think that on CPU's we are not going by Moores law from quite some time.
There are some technological limitations so clock increase has stopped - not many hit 4GHz without serious overclocking. Going into multiple cores doesn't help that much in some tasks - Factorio also likes 1 core heavily and that won't change any time soon.

And still the mobile CPU is always a bit different that desktop one - usually cost is on clock and/or cache sizes. So even if we get more powerful CPU's they might be still better for desktop then mobile version in tablets.
Even if iPad Pro has CPU thats around as half fast as top desktop (on single core performance) I don't really see ow one could comfortably play Factorio on touch screen device.

[indjev99]

I didn't see anybody talking about this, so I am going to say it. In my opinion, even when ignoring the problems with the input, Factorio is still not good for a mobile game. It requires taking a bit of time to think about how you want to set up your factory, where to put things, also sometimes you might need to rework something and so on. But usually when people are playing mobile games, the want to feel like they are constantly progressing forwards, since they might only have a couple of minutes of play time. Imagine this: you have a factory, you play a bit, you then turn it off and realise that you have achieved nothing or perhaps even made your factory worse (if you started reworking something, but then stopped before actually finishing it).
In conclusion, I don't think that Factorio would work on mobile on many levels - from the input up to how it leaves the player feeling.

[brunzenstein]

All this negative opinions regarding portability of Factorio to iOS can easily be proven (by me) as false estimations by people knowing Macs and iPhones / iPads only from window shopping - I shall share a real world example and prove my point:

A game similar to Factorio "This war of Mine" barely runs on my truly vintage 2008 Macbook - it runs but slow as molasses.
De facto unplayable.

Factorio in turn runs on the same stone age machine quite well.

Now to the discussion point - iOS - speak iPad/iPone:

The very same "This war of Mine" (renders black & white only graphics!) performs on my iPhone and iPad as fast as I could wish - lighting fast indeed. And the port from PC/Mac to iOs is not a iota less powerful on iOs or a slimed down version - both are the real thing. The same goes for a similar game "Transistor" (quite bit more cpu demanding then TWOM) - performs hopelessly slow on my vintage MacBook & PC but fast as a weasel on iOS.

This are real world empirical experiences - and they are all what counts.
Having cleared that surrounding fog now that burns down to the two real decisive questions:

- is a port to iOs commercial valid?
- do we have the manpower to do it

Answer today AFAIK:
first: YES - the iOS platform is commercially more then very interesting
second: NO - sorry, we don't have the programmers we would need for such a task today - maybe tomorrow we have

[Overene]

I'd love to see Factorio get ported over to iOS and other mobile devices.

One think I'd like to see if this ever comes is the ability the play cloud-saved worlds from the PC version on your mobile device, and vice versa.
[Koub] : Merged to older topic on porting to ipad & mobile devices.

[ShizukaMiyuki]

All this negative opinions regarding portability of Factorio to iOS can easily be proven (by me) as false estimations by people knowing Macs and iPhones / iPads only from window shopping - I shall share a real world example and prove my point:

A game similar to Factorio "This war of Mine" barely runs on my truly vintage 2008 Macbook - it runs but slow as molasses.
De facto unplayable.

Factorio in turn runs on the same stone age machine quite well.

Now to the discussion point - iOS - speak iPad/iPone:

The very same "This war of Mine" (renders black & white only graphics!) performs on my iPhone and iPad as fast as I could wish - lighting fast indeed. And the port from PC/Mac to iOs is not a iota less powerful on iOs or a slimed down version - both are the real thing. The same goes for a similar game "Transistor" (quite bit more cpu demanding then TWOM) - performs hopelessly slow on my vintage MacBook & PC but fast as a weasel on iOS.

This are real world empirical experiences - and they are all what counts.
Having cleared that surrounding fog now that burns down to the two real decisive questions:

- is a port to iOs commercial valid?
- do we have the manpower to do it

Answer today AFAIK:
first: YES - the iOS platform is commercially more then very interesting
second: NO - sorry, we don't have the programmers we would need for such a task today - maybe tomorrow we have

I'm just gonna reply because someone made a new topic about Mobile ports and I thought this is a great time to bring this thread back.
==================================================================================================================
Okay I did some research:
these are Minimum PC system requirements for This War of Mine, and Transistor:

Transistor:
OS: Windows 7 32-bit.
Processor: Dual Core CPU - 2.6ghz.
Memory: 4 GB RAM.
Graphics: 1GB of VRAM: Intel HD 3000 GPU / AMD HD 5450 / Nvidia 9400 GT.
Storage: 3 GB available space.

This War of Mine:
OS: Windows XP SP3 (32 bit) / Vista
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo 2.4, AMD Athlon(TM) X2 2.8 Ghz
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: Geforce 9600 GS, Radeon HD4000, Shader Model 3.0, 512 MB

I'l put GPU aside, because its not at all an issue, just the game called Dead Trigger on mobile can prove the graphical prowess of mobile phones.
These are not at all demanding even for a Mobile phone, The Iphone 6 has a A8 processor, which has two cores and runs at 1.4 GHz which may sound odd but its one of the fastest CPU's on the mobile market, beating Qualcomm Snapdragon 805, which is the fastest smartphone processor available to Android phones, even when the Snapdragon 805 has four cores and runs at a speed of up to 2.7GHz which can get really hot and I hate it.... my hands get sweaty after holding my phone.
The reason for that is the A8's architecture is more efficient when it comes to handling processes, I won't go in depth to it, read about it here.
so with that, the games you listed are not entirely demanding, but does use quite a bit of power, and lastly I find it unreasonable to compare a game like This War of Mine and Transistor with an open sandbox game like Factorio where the limit is your imagination, although Factorio can theoretically run on Mobile, it does not ensure you will have the best performance once you reach near end game hell even mid game where you have almost thousands of assemblers, bots, conveyor belts, items, trains moving on a 1 screen, do people want to buy a game which starts to become sluggish once you reach a certain point? I don't know... but in my opinion, I won't although it can be fun to play Factorio on a phone on a train and miss the train stop I was gonna go to because I'm too busy fiddling with my factory, I don't like the idea of buying a game which starts to become sluggish at a certain point in the game, and that is not even considering the screen size, and screen clutter.
and the question is an IOS or Android port valid? well it depends, Its valid that people will want to have a mobile port, but is it valid on technical side, is an entirely different story.

[Veurlatonra]

[user deleted]

[Zilboub]

Up

Need this game on mi ipad

But not free to Play

[Engimage]

I think this is not going to happen any time soon. All controls in factorio evolve around mouse and keyboard which you obviously don't have on iPad.
Maybe at some point in the future if the game interface will be completely overwritten it would make some sense but not currently.

[ssilk]

Plus - and you should really read the thread - CPU and memory performance is too bad.

[brunzenstein]

CPU performance of a iPad is today on par with a standard PC.
The point is that Factorio is mainly keyboard driven - so a migration to iOS is, as sad as ist is, absolutely out of reach
Even thought professional Apps like Affinity Photo and Affinity designer https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/ipad/ are as well keyboard driven and soon available for iOs
- the capacity of WUBE's staff is far to limited even think of a portation to iOS

[Formenis]

sorry to revive this thread, but i guess better than create a new one
I'm a great fan of factorio, and would love to see a Factorio port on ipad , i think that the tactile would work great !

I saw that the last post from staff was in 2014 saying

This might happen but not before 1.0. We focus on PC for now.

how far are we before 1.0? (to be honest the game is so polished that I didn't even noticed we weren't in 1.0 )
is this being investigated ? 2014 answer is far away in the past

and discussion in thread saying "ipad cannot handle factorio" are ridiculous, check new ipad pro performances you would be surprised.

so TLDR are there any news about 1.0 and is the possibility of a mobile port being investigated?

[brunzenstein]

how far are we before 1.0? (to be honest the game is so polished that I didn't even noticed we weren't in 1.0 )
is this being investigated ? 2014 answer is far away in the past

You fell again in the 1.April joke