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Football Manager Handheld + Android


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  • SI Staff

If it is decided to release the game on Android then we will announce it via. the usual methods (including this forum).

At present however while I am very interested in the idea of expanding onto new platforms we are concentrating on making the best game possible for the platforms which we are presently supporting.

(and yes I do work there before you ask ;) )

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  • SI Staff
In a press statement, Miles Jacobsen says that the android market has too many different carriers, which could make it a problem for the game to run smoothly on every phone. He's right of course, but it's a pitty :(

Its not an issue with the number of 'carriers' - but more a problem with the myriad if different physical phones available, each with their own unique hardware specification and often with slightly tweaked versions of the Android OS.

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  • 2 weeks later...

But Marc many other developers manage it, and unless im mistaken you can specifiy the game to only run on armv7 devices or only on HVGA phones, and the Android SDK has some useful methods for adapting apps to different screen sizes. I do however see you point about people generally not buying stuff off the market.

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  • 2 weeks later...

As I said on some other thread...

Firstly, I'd like to add that I would love an Android version. I've seen a guy playing it on an iPad in Argentinian airport and I realized that I need it also.

But recently I bought an Android tablet, being an Android website owner I could not have done different way. But the miss I feel of FM is something I can't explain. :/

I've read all the threads about Android and understand that the fragmentation seems a tough issue. Develop an App to the matrix of different devices types, screens, memory and Android version would be really insane. But what the developers usually do is to ship (a) version(s) to the Android devices they are sure about the compatibility first (or only). It's not rare the existence of Apps for only tablets, for instance.

You can choose before publishing an App who will be able to buy/download it that, based on country, carrier, Android version, Screen size and Density, Open GL/ES Version, hardware/software features (such as memory and processor power), DEVICES and etc. Angry Birds did exactly this, shipping first for the top devices and after some time creating adaptations for the small/weak ones. For the FM, I guess the small/weak ones can't receive it anyway.

I mean, let's pretend the SI decide to deliver an Android platform version. You don't need to worry about exactly know about all the processor speeds, memory and Android version. Picking 1 GHz, 512 MB of Ram, Android 2.3, hdpi and xhdpi screens is enough to make a huge number of Football Manager fans happy on Android! Including me, of course.

Google spoke about that on this year's Google IO. See the next 5 minutes of this vídeo here to confirm: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxU8N...ilpage#t=1013s

There are some good stuff about calling native C/C++ libraries or code also that could help, but I'm not sure how it's done how the FM was coded.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • SI Staff
I just noticed that SI are advertising for another Handheld developer - Android version in the pipeline perhaps?

Hey presently the handheld coing team are outnumbered by the amount of devices we support (me and Rich vs iPhone, iPad & PSP) ... let us at least outnumber the amount of platforms covered before asking us to do new ones ;)

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  • 2 weeks later...

Seems like a poor excuse not to put it on android to me.. the screen size is bigger on android phones, a lot of phones are more powerful than the iphone 4 and the android market share will blow ios out of the water by next year. Surely it's obvious that an android developer would pay for themself!

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Yeah, stop arsing about and just get on with it. No good reason why this can't be done.

As mentioned before I would sincerely like us to support the Android platform at some point going forward and will do everything I can to help with this HOWEVER that being said my main goal at present is to ensure that our currently supported platforms are supported to the best of our ability ... and they already keep our team kinda busy.

Porting to the Android is not a small task at all and the disparate screen resolutions and device capabilities INCREASE the time which will be required to undertake such a port, every screen resolution supported means more development resources for creating the layouts for them and increased QA for ensuring that all such possibilities work correctly ...

ie. perhaps one day, but please be patient - with our present handheld development staff we're fairly busy as it is ... it took me 2 months to make the initial prototype for the iPhone game in my spare time, then another 9 months work after it was approved and brought internally to SEGA/SI to actually make it into a proper releasable game.

Its really flattering that you chaps are interested in playing FMH and I really want my games to be played by as many people as possible - however if we rushed something out which was below par it wouldn't help either yourselves or SI in the long run; one day I hope we will have Android support - but when we do we'll do our utmost (as always) to do it properly ...

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Fair enough. Get some hired goons in and take over the world then :)

Thats the ultimate plan - but presently we're still looking for a white cat to perch on the edge of Miles chair while he stokes it in a sinister fashion ....

(see this is part of the process also, we have to tell Mr Bond all our nefarious plans before they're completed - I've read the training manual :D)

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  • 2 weeks later...

RE: FMH on Android, taken from.. http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG.Biz/Sports+Interactive+news/news.asp?c=34554

It's an issue Google no doubt hoped Android had put behind it, but the question of fragmentation on the platform has once again reared its splintered head.

Sports Interactive is the latest developer to claim Android's fragmented state makes supporting the platform too difficult a task.

As such, studio manager Miles Jacobson has claimed the disjointed nature of the platform has ruled out any appearance of the firm's Football Manager franchise any time soon.

No plan B

"We hope at some point there is less fragmentation in the Android market, but that is why we haven't gone onto Android already," said Jacobson in an interview with Pocket-lint, with Football Manager 2012 currently preparing to launch on iOS.

"Basically, with everyone making their own version of Android it makes it really really hard [to guarantee that it works universally].”

In short, Jacobson said managing the multifaceted nature of Android is simply too much for a studio like Sports Interactive to bear.

Repeat play

Indeed, it's a problem the developer has encountered before - on PC.

"Open source software is fantastic, but that's also where Linux has gone wrong for us," he added.

"If there was one flavour of Linux, we'd have a Linux version out there. But with six or seven different versions of Linux, that's six or seven different amounts of testing we'd have to do. It's not the actual development, it's testing a game that's as massive as Football Manager.

"And that's the same with Android. We want to do it as a studio. We have a bunch of guys at the studio who have Android phones. We'd love to do it. But, at the moment, we're not there. So, we're sticking to iOS for now."

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That's nonsense, Mojang could do it perfectly with Minecraft, I can all but guarantee that I could make a game that runs on multiple OS's and distro's. As long as you abstract sufficiently there shouldn't be a major issue.

(Oh, and for the record, there are plenty more than 6 or 7 versions of Linux, give me a while and I could have my own LFS system up and running).

When I finish my Android game and get it running on multiple phones, then tell me it's not possible. And on the Linux issue, if Civilisation IV can be run in Linux why can't FM12?

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No-one's saying it's not possible just that currently, with the resources we have, we feel they're best spent on making the iOS and PSP version as good as they can be.

Especially as, because of fragmentation on Android devices, it would take a lot more resource to make it work than it currently does on iOS.

As Marc has said, we'd love to do at some point, but right now, it's not part of the plans :)

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Am sorry but fragmentation doesnt exist on android, and really? you'll make a psp version, with the next psp version about to come out, no one even still buys psp games, yet theres 200 million android phones out their.

You say theres fragmentation because android has different screen sizes?? this is ridiculous, android natively scales, its a rubbish excuse and youve been using it for more than 18months now. Android is top dog in the mobile world, and its your loss, if your not willing to innovate and change, you will be taken over.

Just stop spreading the rubbish fragmentation crap, no one else seems to struggle when konami can bring PES to android, EA with fifa and dead space, theres a ton of high quality games out on android, and guess what.... the screen size has nothing to do with it. 200 million android phones are on android 2.2 and above, its dead simple, if your bothered about people having different versions of android then make it using the api tools of android 2.2 and take the 98% of the market thats on 2.2 and above. Any versions thats on a later version of android will still work with all previous versions of android.

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All the games you listed are games that use 3D modelling that can scale down, FMH uses mainly text so would need to be rearranged as it cannot just be scaled. Also from a market point of view they will have to get several lots of each phone + people to test the game on each extensivly to make sure it works.

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Am sorry but fragmentation doesnt exist on android, and really? you'll make a psp version, with the next psp version about to come out, no one even still buys psp games, yet theres 200 million android phones out their.

You say theres fragmentation because android has different screen sizes?? this is ridiculous, android natively scales, its a rubbish excuse and youve been using it for more than 18months now. Android is top dog in the mobile world, and its your loss, if your not willing to innovate and change, you will be taken over.

Just stop spreading the rubbish fragmentation crap, no one else seems to struggle when konami can bring PES to android, EA with fifa and dead space, theres a ton of high quality games out on android, and guess what.... the screen size has nothing to do with it. 200 million android phones are on android 2.2 and above, its dead simple, if your bothered about people having different versions of android then make it using the api tools of android 2.2 and take the 98% of the market thats on 2.2 and above. Any versions thats on a later version of android will still work with all previous versions of android.

All we're saying is that, because of the nature of Android, it costs more and takes more people to develop and test for than it does for the PSP or iOS, so at the moment we've decided to use what little resource we have on the Handheld project concentrating on what's already out there.

We're not saying it's something we don't want to do, nor something that will never happen. Just that we're currently prioritizing the products that already in the marketplace.

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  • SI Staff
You say theres fragmentation because android has different screen sizes?? this is ridiculous, android natively scales

Native scaling works fine for applications with limited text - however if you try scaling text by a non-regular amount then you will end up with both an application which looks sub-par but also one which within which text probably be hard to read.

This is one of the reasons why when implementing iPad support for iOS we did a brand new HD skin rather than simply stretch the SD one; the first thing I did when looking at the iPad was to use automatic scaling to determine if support could be implemented in that manner, it 'was' possible - but only if we accepted releasing a product which was sub-par ... which isn't something I'll entertain.

As I've stated previously I DO hope to support Android at some point in the future* - however its not a simple undertaking and I can't make any promises in this regard.

You are more than welcome to state your feelings about this obviously, however I think we've indicated we have valid reasons as to why it hasn't been implemented yet.

*Various reasons, I want as many people as possible to be able to play my games, I like Google as a company, I'm a big lover of unix/linux ... and of course it gives me some new tech to play with :D

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  • 1 month later...

I see that Android is still dominating even more now

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/11/01/google-blasts-past-apple-android-now-50-of-market/

has over 50% and Iphone only has 20% of the UK market.

Look android acts differently than ios, just because you used the automatic scaling for the ipad version and it looked horrible doesnt mean that this is how it works on Android,

"Starting with Android 1.6 (API Level 4), Android provides support for multiple screen sizes and densities, reflecting the many different screen configurations that a device may have. You can use features of the Android system to optimize your application's user interface for each screen configuration and ensure that your application not only renders properly, but provides the best user experience possible on each screen.

To simplify the way that you design your user interfaces for multiple screens, Android divides the range of actual screen sizes and densities into:

A set of four generalized sizes: small, normal, large, and xlarge"

And note that the normal screen size is 3.5 - 4.5 inch screen, so that covers 97% of all android phones out there. Therefore you only have to code for the normal preset, then when you submit it to the android market, only devices that have a normal size screen can see the app, it wouldnt show up on tablet devices so you wouldnt get horrible reviews because they wouldnt be able to even install it.

Native scaling looks rubbish on an IPhone, Not on an Android phone, The iphone was only meant to have one screen size, so all apps where meant to be designed for that one screen size, when they got to iphone4, they realised that the PPI of the iphone was too low and the only way to fix this without breaking the existing app store was to exactly double the resolution of the iphone then allow all apps to scale to 4x as many pixels, (hence we ended up with the so called retina display) this is not the way android was developed, android was developed from the ground up to support many different screen sizes and for it to look good whether you have a 3.7 inch desire or a 4.3 inch galaxy s 2.

Being a text only game should make everything easy, when you have a graphic intensive game then you need a couple of phones to make sure it works ok, ones with different GPU's, mainly the adreno 220, tegra2, mali 400, and the PowerVR SGX540, so yeah that can make it more complicated, however since this is a texted based game, the cpu should do most of the work, making the game much easier to use, so long as its coded right, as essentially like you said its all text on the screen so its no different than most apps like facebook for example, all that is is text on a screen, but the facebook app looks great on a 3.7 inch screen or on the new galaxy nexus which has a 4.3 inch "useable screen" as the other 0.35 is used for the on screen buttons/

obviously ive given up hope of this ever coming to android, because all of those "valid" reasons you gave will never change, android will always run on different hardware and have different screen sizes, it just pains me to see my favourite game that ive had since cm3 back in 99/00, not moving on with the times and making a game for the most popular mobile operating system available, while spurting things out like " Just that we're currently prioritizing the products that already in the marketplace." which doesnt make sense, i still dont know what you mean by that, is android not currently in the market place? because last time i checked google had 200 million active handsets was activating 550,000 units A DAY!, while no one buys psp games anymore, no one even makes psp games any more, i cant even tell you 10 games that came out in 2011 on the psp?? that system sold 50 million units so again i just cant see the logic behind the lets use the limited resources that we have to make a psp game that wont sell? - though it will be interesting if you can update us with how many psp units sell?

In all am just massively dissapointed in the continued blindness with the failure to launch an android version.

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I have to say, my pet Android project looks just as good whether I'm testing it on a HTC Desire (small screen, 480x800), Samsung Galaxy SII (big screen, 480x800), HTC Sensation (big screen, 540x960). It also looks good with the majority of the "standard" screen resolutions that I throw at it through the simulator.

All in all I think Google have got the automatic scaling pretty nice.

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The fact that you can get the majority of paid android apps for free without having to root/jailbreak your phone etc may well have a bearing...iFMH is a premium game for 6.99 on the market, to release such an app on android market may not be financially worth it by all means. Despite the growing number of Android phones, they have only just surpassed the app store on market downloads/purchase.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...
The fact that you can get the majority of paid android apps for free without having to root/jailbreak your phone etc may well have a bearing...iFMH is a premium game for 6.99 on the market, to release such an app on android market may not be financially worth it by all means. Despite the growing number of Android phones, they have only just surpassed the app store on market downloads/purchase.

Not everyone is a pirate. The games in the android market sell loads.

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Any proof of this? He didn't state everyone was a pirate but the majority of pirates compared to iOS is greater.

Again, any proof of this? One game studio released stats on their game sales. 3000 sales, 3,000,00 players in China alone. The game was only available on iOS.

(Oh, and this was a cheap-ish £1.59 game, not even a £6.99 premium game).

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Again, any proof of this? One game studio released stats on their game sales. 3000 sales, 3,000,00 players in China alone. The game was only available on iOS.

(Oh, and this was a cheap-ish £1.59 game, not even a £6.99 premium game).

Well obviously there will be more pirated copies on ios than android if its not available on android. That should be obvious.

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Oh man, I barely feel up to explaining the nonsensical nature of that post...

That was not my point, my point was to explain that you cannot criticise android for having a pirate problem when IOS has an equally big (if not bigger, I have not seen the figures) problem.

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  • SI Staff
That was not my point, my point was to explain that you cannot criticise android for having a pirate problem when IOS has an equally big (if not bigger, I have not seen the figures) problem.

Just to go over a couple of things ...

I like the concept of the Android platform and its general 'openness' ... one day I hope we will be able to release upon it, but there isn't a fixed timeline for this to occur (bear in mind we have a very compact handheld development team and are already kinda busy as it is).

With regards to piracy personally I have faith that players of the game will in the main be honest and support us on whatever platform we take our products to, simply put if they don't then that platform won't be supported in the future (so if at some stage we release on the Android its really up to users on that device to decide whether to support us and encourage future development on that platform or not).

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Piracy on iOS devices is far more organised and advanced than it is on Android, so no, it's not a reason against Android in itself. I have both devices by the way. As Marc says, it's down to the users to support the developer by paying for the game. I can't think of any other game on iOS or Android that has the feedback and interaction from the developer that FHM has. If the team puts out an Android version and hardly anyone pays for it then they get what they deserve - no more development.

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walsh, you're being very provocative, apple fanboy much? (EDIT: Or looking for a flamewar, methinks) I'm not going to bother replying now as I work by the maxim of Don't feed the trolls.

Marc, I see where you're coming from, it's the biggest reason that I don't pirate games when I probably could quite easily, and discourage my friends form doing it (similarly the reason I buy stuff like the humble bundle).

I'm glad that one day it's coming to android, although sadly that may be the day my iPod finally goes into retirement, heh. Looking forward to it :)

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hello :)

first... sorry for my english.

im missing fmh... had 1 year ago ipod touch and played for long time fmh, its perfect to play fm everywhere u want...

but im using now since last year an android phone, Samsung Galaxy S i9000 with Android. theres no really a football manager in market to play offline with real teams and players. only poor online managers, with fantasy names. had no fun. fifa 12 and pes 12 on android is just boring me. not the same like on PC, XBOX or PS3. But i think Strategy-Simulation games are gr8 on the new smartphones (with more power)..

they are releasing more and more games with high-end graphics. they can do it better in the future. Football Manager dont need this all, i think its very possible to release FMH for Android and every Smartphone.

Im sure, if FMH first time released it will break all records. "Best Newcomer", "Number 1 Download of All Time", "Best Soccer Game for Android", Award winner^^ in short: FMH would rock Android and I WOULD BUY IT FOR (?) 9,99€! cause i know, it worth with this big community and perfect support.

I heard they work for a better PSP & iO's Version on FMH, that why they have no time (and money?) for an android version? is that the only problem?

We all know, Android is now 50% of market. it beats both together (PSP and IOS). Think about it!

Maybe u have a special contract with Apple or Sony, to release ur games only on there platforms, i would understand this. But please don't tell us, u have no time and money to create FMH for Android.

Im still hoping for Football Manager on my next Handy Samsung Galaxy III :cool: never give up^^

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  • 1 month later...
Just to go over a couple of things ...

I like the concept of the Android platform and its general 'openness' ... one day I hope we will be able to release upon it, but there isn't a fixed timeline for this to occur (bear in mind we have a very compact handheld development team and are already kinda busy as it is).

With regards to piracy personally I have faith that players of the game will in the main be honest and support us on whatever platform we take our products to, simply put if they don't then that platform won't be supported in the future (so if at some stage we release on the Android its really up to users on that device to decide whether to support us and encourage future development on that platform or not).

Well heres another hint marc, people have been going on about this for years..... there activating over 800,000 handsents a day!, and are approaching the 300million mark, stop making games for the psp, which is now out dated and useless, and make an android version.

Now i would love to see a ps vita version, but i will go bat cray if one came out over an android one since android has 300million phones out there, and the vita is brand new with only a million or so.

If dead space can be on android am pretty sure a non graphical game like football manager can be done very easily.

ps i would love to know how many versions of football 2012 have sold for the psp, since it was the only game to to come out for that whole device in 2011 since everyone else knew that platform was dead.

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"ps i would love to know how many versions of football 2012 have sold for the psp, since it was the only game to to come out for that whole device in 2011 since everyone else knew that platform was dead. "

Really?

I can understand you need for it but you have brought up no new arguments and nothing Marc hasn't answered. Yes it is selling well but people don't buy as many apps on Android and as Marc stated there are fragmentation - different OS, resolution issues. Plus believe it or not it is harder to scale down text than it is models as there's a lot more coding that would need to be converted and different screens would need to be redone in order to compensate for different resolutions - lots of time and money for only 2 people to do who are both working on mainly the iOS version. (PSP features have been ported from iOS for 2 years now).

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Yes it is selling well but people don't buy as many apps on Android

Blargh!

I was waiting for that to come up. Whilst yes, it is true that is for one primary reason. Initially the high-end phone was considered to be the Apple iPhone, the majority of Android phones were budget end ones that were significantly cheaper than the Apple equivalent. The affluence of the phone owner will understandably affect their willingness to part with their cash.

However.

Since then, more and more high end and high spec phone have been released. Businesses are increasingly turning to Android phones over the iPhone (for example, HTC Sensation). This shows the increasing affluence of the phone users and will gradually propagate out across the populous. Remember, the majority of phone contracts last two years, whilst the current smart phone market is working on a much faster scale. How likely is it that those iPhone 3GS users will adopt the iPhone 4S or will they do what most people will do and check the market for other equivalent devices? The tipping point is being reached now where people are realising Android is a competitive high-end device platform and people are increasingly turning to that over iOS.

What this means is that game sales are increasing all the time. You can see this for yourself by taking a look at the market and seeing how many downloads paid apps have had compared to this time last year (in the realms of 5-10x as much, even for the new ones).

And on fragmentation..screen size is hardly an argument, the majority of devices have very similar sizes and fit into the same few ranges (800x480, 854x480, and soon 1920x1080). A few of the older phones still have 240x320. That's four sizes, and whilst there are a few more each size only differs by a tiny amount on each scale. Have some form of relative positioning that on the first switch on creates hardcoded positions for each of the objects in the game, after all, as you can see from the iOS version there is plenty of blank space available on the screen, so the jump from 16:9 to 16:10 is manageable from one time code creating the hard xy coordinates. Text is easy to scale down, but what you could also do if you don't want to support the full range of size is just draw it small and scale upwards, which is also possible (for instance go from 240x320 and x4 like the iOS version used to do). The OS is NOT fragmentation, all devices use the Android OS and just have different layers built on top of it, i.e. different third party apps installed. They all use Android.

And of course, the market allows you to choose minimum specs that the phone requires for your app to be visible in the market (yes that's right, it doesn't do the same as the App Store and tell you it can't be downloaded, it actually makes it invisible in the first place). If you only want to support screen sizes of 800x480 upwards you can say that. If you only want to support 800x480 and 854x480, again, just put that in the manifest and it's what will happen. Fragmentation is easy to build around especially when so many specs outside of power are comparable on many devices. Even with power the phones are still by and large faster than the iPod Touch 2nd Gen which is the lowest denomination supported by the current iOS game.*

*I talk from my experience using ZTE Blade and my Brother's Orange San Francisco (<£100)

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