Numbers continue to dwindle, when are the developers going to turn this into a true App you could download at the Apple App store? Droid App store etc...

This needs to happen!

Do it, Bombay, do it. :)

from what i've read it's not going to happen because two reasons

1) it costs 99 dollars to post an app to the app store or sometime

2) the admins don't have the time/desire to do it, and i can't blame them

yea its 99 bucks per year to join ios dev program and also would need mac (for ios emulator). not much if pays that only once and game changes don't mean that app needs to be updated.

google play costs 25 bucks only once, app would need to have 2 versions (phone and tablets).

in both cases they might need to learn new programming.

marshal, you probably have to have a lot more than 2 versions for 'droid. xinhuan will probably wander in here in an hour or two and remind us all that android is a gold plated sunovafluff to develop for :p

I'll donate to those fees...

yep. it definitely needs more brain dead moron bot users to enter the game. so, if they price the app @ $1, how many of those Apple bots will be willing to miss out on 1 song just for the opportunity to play this game?

I'd love to do an app! but we have a whole bunch of things piled up on the drawing board first...

Just FYI if you do an app and its an iOS app I cant play! Android or bust!

*hopes Xin doesn't see this post*

App completely free, just sneak in advertising into it like other companies do.

Why are bots going to play Earth?

What is more important then getting new users into the game? The population continues to dwindle, there won't be anyone left to use the new cool features...

EE Flappy Bird edition ! :P

++FlapEE Bird

OK, so you've got other stuff piled up to do before you get to the app.

How can we get that stuff done so the app can happen?

Can you start a patreon or a kickstarter or something? I'll pay $50 or something, if other people pay too and hit a benchmark can we get fluff caught up and get the app out there?

blid: you need to clone qz and pang to make drawing board empty.

But seriously.... to expand on the "list" point

Step 1: Redo the UI so it's mobile-focused and responsive (and looks better on desktops too)
Step 2: Create simple apps for iOS and Android using web containers
Step 3: Less complaining :D

I've grown very tired of PHP as a language and am swamped in general so it's unlikely I'll ever have a 2010 sort of attitude for this game again. That being said, I'll help do a UI redesign when qz's back into developing even if it's only creating some new markup/css and writing the iOS/Android wrappers.

I've debated the idea of a kickstarter campaign (mainly targeted at KJ :p) but I think it'll only generate $10-15k tops (to share) and I have other more lucrative hobby work that doesn't have the downsides that managing this community has had. Hobbies are supposed to be fun :p

as pang said above.. ^^^

You guys suck

perhaps.. but the more important question is:
do you swallow

terrible.

watch out, some guy is going to come on here and tell you it'll cost 500k to develop earth to an app lol

This game as an app wouldn't be any good unless that app brought in some kind of graphical interface not just buttons and text. That's my opinion.

Want this game as a app right now?

Open moble google chrome and go to: m.earthempires.com

The point is the only way to attract new players to EE is via Mobile Phone app that is free from the download store.

Side note about android/kindle. It has to be .apk. and if i doesnt hit the kindle market store jist make the ap available somewhrre as .apk so ican side load it :p

Just an official ap the redirected here might bribg some new faces in...

Regarding AI countries:
the idea there would be to add enough countries so that n00bs are sheltered; remember back in 2000/2001 when there were so many low countries that you were never seriously farmed? compare to now, where 400 people farm 1 new player?

anyway, that's my idea anyway :)

as for apps, yea, part of redoing the UI is so that it's all HTML5 and then doing an app is basically super trivial -- jam it in a web browser....

with ~15k countries no need to grab same country more than once.

bombay: yea app should be free but maybe some ingame things like extra turns (like 10-20 turns) could be bought with money (99 cents per turn).

i agree with marshal for maybe the first time ever

Ok.. maybe just maybe, qz/pang can do an API, where we (other developers) can tap into and help in creating this app.

just a basic push/pull of data (with proper authentication, of course)

or maybe i'm just ignorant and there is already something like this? (thinking of ghqnet and other sites)

I wrote a fairly complete API (minus attacking/spying) with simple private-key authentication back in like 2011 for the purposes of AI bots. It was never really used for whatever reason and it became broken as other things were changed. qz fixed it up recently to work with his other major changes so that's cool. :)

IMO, there's not a huge amount of value in writing a straight up app for EE unless it's for in-app purchases and stuff like that. The major gains of writing an app don't really apply to EE because it's text based. Forking the UI codebase sounds like a maintenance headache compared to doing a web container app with a responsive HTML5/CSS3 UI.

Related to other developers... we've been burned a lot by that in the past ("skilled" people professing to want to help.... then abusing their access) so we're pretty jaded, to be perfectly honest. I know there are good developers out there in this community but I'm personally very hesitant about that sort of stuff at this stage. I worry another such incident will sour me and qz for the final time. :(

But I like Marshal's idea too. Everyone buy gems before you FS! :D

Can i have platinum acct back? Plz..

on what?

not 1st time either.



no.

maybe you guys would be interested in my game?

^^^
+1000

..TO EXPAND ON THAT THOUGHT.. I DON'T NEED ANOTHER APP CLUTTERING UP MY PHONE IF ALL IT IS IS A SPECIALIZED WEB BROWSER. PART OF THE DRAW OF E:2025 WAS THAT IT WAS A "BROWSER-BASED GAME", I.E., I CAN PLAY FROM WHEREVER AS LONG AS I CAN CIRCUMVENT THE APPROPRIATE FIREWALLS/PROXIES AND NOT GET FIRED FOR PLAYING GAMES AT WORK. ;-)

doubt it.

Only if you want triple AAA graphics (which was the original premise of that thread). :)

If it's text based, it's probably less than a couple of day's work to embed a browser window in an app, and pretend it is a real app. I'm not certain such a "wrapper" would actually count as an app and pass Apple App Validation either.

The thing is, you can already play it in any phone browser, what advantages are there to make it an app other than push notifications? (Edit: Most phones, even Apple, allows you to make a webpage shortcut on your home screen too, if you want to pretend that is an App.)

Lets new people find it in the App Store

Have you seen how many million apps there are on the App Store that have less than 50 downloads? Why would people find this one app? By randomly searching "Earth"? Or "Empires"? There are 100+ new apps/updates approved on the App store every minute, 99.9% of which never see the light, and most of which are just hobby apps to add to their resume.

It will explode like Flappy Bird

It's not that its hard to make an app. Especially if its just a browser wrapper.

It's really that making an app serves no purpose. Most of you think "hey lets put it on the app store" and it magically makes money. No it really doesn't work that way. Many friends have put out apps, and they see maybe 500 downloads tops over the entire year, a portion of which are just personal friends who saw it on Facebook that one time. You can read about this type of blogs all the time on the web too.

The App Store is really saturated. To get anywhere, you actually need to do marketing. Buying ad banner space for a week on a heavily visited website that covers gaming on mobile devices would probably cost you $10k, and the returns aren't anywhere worth it, most people don't even notice banner ads these days even if they don't run adblock. What you need then is product reviews from websites that cover games (especially upcoming games), and hope it spreads from there. This isn't going to happen for EE, especially if you don't know any industry contacts with those review websites. This is called "Hype". Is anyone going to make game trailers about EE? Maybe even a promotional video to show viewers why they should pick up the game on the app store? How about a video about all the exciting things you can do in EE?

If your app doesn't appear on the "What's New?" "What's Hot?" or "Editor's pick", or Top 10 Paid/Grossing/Free/etc, you can forget about it. For any typical user that visits the App Store, they either are searching for a very specific app, or they are browsing one of these "top lists".

A combination of earth, sim city, civilization and utopia. And no more land problems