Long War - IOS IPad/IPhone

[gewone1]

I recently bought xcom enemy within for IOS to be able to play on the go but as I play xcom with long war almost always I was wondering if long war is also compatable with iOS and if so how to install it. I like xcom but I love long war :)

 

Youri

[Amineri]

This isn't something that either JL or I can test, since neither of us own XCOM:EW on iOS or Android. I can give some general information, however.

 

XCOM is built using the Unreal Engine 3, which provides support for "cooking" versions for consoles and mobile devices as well as for the various PC platforms. Here's a link about what cooking does : https://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ContentCooking.html .

 

In particular that article mentions that it :

 

• Stripping out of any data that is not necessary such as editor-only data (this makes a large impact on file size)
• Byte-swapping all data so that it can be loaded by big-endian architectures without CPU overhead for byteswapping
• Processing resources so that they are stored in their native format and are ready for loading directly without any further processing on the console
• Creating seek-free, self-contained packages for optimal loading from media with slow seek times (ie, DVD/BD)

 

I did a little digging and it appears that the ARM processors on which both iOS and Android run are bi-endian, but that the OS in both cases runs them in little endian, which is the same format used by Intel PCs, so Windows, OS X (Intel, not PowerPC), and Linux are the same format.

 

So it seems like it might be possible to swap in the modded upk files we use in common across Windows, Mac and Linux versions of Long War, as they are cooked/modded little endian. Long War also makes extensive changes to the config files in order to set data, and those would have to be updated as well.

 

 

Another potential issue :

 

On consoles, UE3 only supports loading cooked packages. UE3 on PC can load cooked, uncooked, or even a mix of both.

This doesn't indicate whether the iOS / Android versions of the Unreal Engine can support uncooked packages.

We currently distribute some packages that we have created ourselves with UDK as part of the Long War mod.

• LongWar.upk is an uncooked texture package (it contains all of the new inventory, flag, project, etc images). I have experimented successfully with cooking this package, but currently it's not released that way.
• XComMutator.u and XComLZMutator.u are some mutator script packages developed by wghost that implement the new randomized landing zones, and are also installed with Long War. I'm not sure if these are cooked, but based on the .u extension I'd guess not.

 

--------------------

 

Short answer, we don't have an installer for it, but it may be possible to manually install given some tweaking and experimentation.

[wghost81]

*.u script packages are uncooked, but they can be cooked if necessary.

[gewone1]

Thanks for the detailed awnser I will deffenetly try to experiment with this. I'm not exactly a coder but I will see how far I get. Edited December 29, 2014 by gewone1

[KiddieGrinder]

I'm surprised no one followed up with this. Anyway peoples, I would like your help. I'm looking to get this thing working on my Iphone and I was wondering about how to exactly cook packages?I was looking at UFE and only saw two profiles. If I wanted to cook the packages for use on other systems would I need the corresponding profile? More plainly,Do I need the Android profile in Unreal Front End to get it running on my Phone?

 

 

Ultimately I would like to get this working for ALL platforms, but if I can only get this working for android I'd be ok with that too.

 

Thanks guys!

Edited April 24, 2015 by KiddieGrinder

[nofear001]

I know this is a 6 month old thread but for the love of all that is holy, please release this to the iphone or produce a step-by-step guide so that we can do it ourselves!

[tracktwo]

I'd be shocked it if was possible in any reasonable way. iOS has a lot more in common with the consoles than the PC in that you can't really load arbitrary files onto an app and run them, it's basically a totally locked down platform. I'd expect an Android port long before an iOS one, but even that I'd be skeptical about. These are not mod-friendly platforms.

[gewone1]

I have not found a way to do it so far but I have not "really" tried so much. Turned out to be a bit more work than I was willing to invest into it at least at the moment so I kinda abandoned the idea. Edited October 25, 2015 by gewone1

[KiddieGrinder]

Hey, gewone1. I see you that replied even months later. Are you still interested in porting it? I did a bit of testing myself and gave up, but the idea of eventually porting this mod has been gnawing at me for months. I still come back to it now and then. if you're still interested maybe we can work together with the mod developers to get it working. Much like what they did with the linux and mac version.

 

Also, Android is based off of linux, so maybe there should be some similarities.

 

If anyone is interested in working on this together just message me and we can give it the old communist try.

[gewone1]

I am currently a bit strained on time due to school (low grades for important subjects is the main issue). So I'm afraid I do not have the time at the moment. Maybe later I'll have some more time.