KoL type client for Android/iPhone

I wonder how playable this game would be with a Kingdom of Loathing (KoL) type client on an Android or iPhone.

I have no idea what you're talking about. However, the idea of running a MMO on a cellphone sounds like a bad idea, considering that just browsing forums on my phone can occasionally get me warnings about approaching the monthly data limit for my plan.

Don't know about KoL, but I would love a thin client or whatever so I could play CoH n my phone. My phone *is* my internet connection, so even when playing on the PC, I am connecting via my phone. An app that would list me see my Heroes, play the market, or even play the game would be fantastic. Have to think it would help CoH too with portability and better market penetration.... I'd rather be playing CoH than Angry Birds. I'm tired of Red Bird Hero.

Besides the screen size issues, I'd imagine this would lead to nothing but frustration. It would run into the same issues that many primarily PC based MMOs hit when trying to integrate a normal console interface...lack of controls available to control. Text would be either far too small to read or take up way too much of the screen, getting your power trays to a size big enough to be able to distinguish finger touches correctly would take up nearly the whole screen or more for most people. Movement could be limited with tilting the phone, but that would also, i'd imagine, end up frustrating me more. Then jumping would be interesting without physical buttons. Even an iPad or other similarly sized tablets would run into many of these issues.

Possible a character editor, enhancement, auction house interface could be possible if we had something like the fabled city vault interface ever, but we know where that went. Doable...maybe considering we have a mac client, I suppose with some hacking you may be able to get that ported to iOS with some decent time and effort, but even that has had its own issues. I'd say an officially supported app for any mobile platform is somewhere between none and "We are aware of the request". but I could be wrong, but definitely not any more than "Not on the radar".

KoL is a web game. It's HTML. It's not even a Flash game or something, it's just plain HTML frames and a small bit of JavaScript. There's NO WAY a "KoL type client" could be ported to City of Heroes.

City of Heroes looks pretty bad on the lowest graphics settings, and I can't imagine that more than the lowest textures and models would be available on a cell phone. If even that much.

Does anyone have any kind of 3D online game playing on a cell? Guild Wars? Call of Duty? Anything? I honestly haven't heard of anyone even attempting this. Even assuming that a 500MHz to 900MHz ARM CPU could keep up, I doubt the average phone has enough storage to download even a reduced graphics version of the game.

It's an interesting idea, I guess, in a completely pointy-haired boss sort of way, but I'm pretty sure it's 100% technically unfeasible.

There are full 3D MMO clients that run on iPhone (at least) and I believe Android as well. (Look up Order and Chaos online for an example.) However, these clients are specifically designed to utilize the hardware available on those platforms. This game is most decidedly not. Nor would I want them to dedicate resources to developing a thin client that would work on these platforms that could instead be used to develop more regular content/fix existing issues.

I'm not going to dismiss the idea outright, but how would such a client work? We have so much interaction and so many controls, would such an endeavor, even if it could happen, be worthwhile? I mean, seriously, imagine for a minute trying to fight some average battle on a CoH client on a cell phone. Moving around in battle, choosing powers to execute, selecting targets, interacting with teammates (to heal, etc.), chatting, etc. How in the world could they pack that functionality to fit on a ~4.5-inch screen? Even if they could, I almost certainly wouldn't want to play with someone trying to carry all of that out while I'm getting killed.

What I would like, however, are mobile interfaces into the game. For example, an app that would let me transfer items among my characters, or buy/sell items on the market. That kind of thing.

Basically, current phones don't really have enough power to support running something like CoH on them. They can be tethered to a regular laptop or workstation and act as an internet connection for the game. But actually playing the game on the phone?

No. Uh uh.

If the devs were of a mind (and the last Player Summit indicated they aren't), they'd have to basically build a specialty client JUST for each given type of phone.

They have enough problems just supporting Mac as it is. They simply don't have the resources or partnerships to accomplish something like this in any sort of timeframe you could call reasonable.

Moreover, there'd have to be some major changes in the game interface to make it small form-factor friendly. This would probably result in a loss of functionality on the PC users' end.

Give it another 8 years. Then see where mobile devices are.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

There is a program called SplashTop that will allow you to run your computers from your phones/tablets. I've used it to log into the game (really just when I was out of town, and wanted to check something on another account while the game was running on my laptop).

On another note..I've used the program to email files from my computer to my tablet, and access MS Word before I got DocsToGo. It's quite useful, especially now that I don't need to carry my computer to school anymore.

I don't think we could play the same game on our phones and computers, but it's all 'just' city of spreadsheets at the end of the day - we are mashing buttons and taking actions that change various values in a database for our heroes..... be it our health, inv, exp, inv, whatever. I think it would be possible to do that (even if just to just some limited extent like access the market or your build) from a phone, but I also expect that unfortunately(*) that Devs won't do that anytime soon. Maybe the whole mobile thing is just a fad, like that "internet" thing turned out to be. OTOH, maybe I'll need to buy a Surface with win 8 pro on it and see what that can do (although a solution that actually played to the strength of what people like about moblie would be better).


(*) unfortunately in the context of it would be neat to have, not unfortunately in the context of 'gee I wish they would do that instead of creating the next issue'

KoL is text based, just won't work for CoX in my opinion. Truthfully I would not mind seeing CoX ported to Android (or any) tablets, but it could not be like KoL. . .