Making this my thesis topic

[Miriam Melnick]

Hi -

I am thinking of taking this on as my undergraduate thesis project. It sounds like the Android app already exists and an iPad app is desired?

- Miriam

[Todd Jones]

Can we talk in the phone

Sent from my iPhone
Please excuse typos

[Nico Weber]

Hi Miriam,

On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Miriam Melnick <miriam....@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am thinking of taking this on as my undergraduate thesis project. It
> sounds like the Android app already exists and an iPad app is desired?

Correct: An Android app exists, but no iOS port. The Android app is
based on an earlier version of the web code and doesn't use the
resource format that the current web version uses though. (Sadly, the
geometry packer used by body outputs .js files instead of .json files,
but that could probably be fixed.) The Android version is checked in
to SVN.

The Android version is currently written completely in Java. If you do
an iOS port, you'd have to decide if you want to make an Objective-C
port, or if you'd want to try to create a C library that could be used
by both iOS and Android for most of the app. Not sharing code is
easier to do and probably better suited to an undergraduate thesis
project.

Note that the Zygote Body data isn't open-source, and it's not
guaranteed that the Zygote folks would create a Zygote Body app using
your code. (They didn't create a Zygote Body Android app either, even
though the code is there.)

Nico

[Miriam Melnick]

Hi Nico,

My understanding is that desktop browsers use OpenGL and android and iOS both use OpenGL ES. When you were programming the Android version, did you run into any trouble with this? Were there any features of OpenGL that were not present in OpenGL ES?

Thanks,

Miriam

[Nico Weber]

Hi Miriam,

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 6:17 AM, Miriam Melnick
<miriam....@gmail.com> wrote:
> My understanding is that desktop browsers use OpenGL and android and iOS
> both use OpenGL ES. When you were programming the Android version, did you
> run into any trouble with this? Were there any features of OpenGL that were
> not present in OpenGL ES?

the desktop version uses WebGL, which is more or less a JavaScript
binding for OpenGL ES 2.0 -- so both the desktop and the mobile
versions use OpenGL ES in a sense.

So I didn't run into any trouble there. There were a few minor bumps
due to shaders not being 100% compatible, and I had to simplify some
things to make them work on mobile (slower processors, less ram, etc).

Nico

[Miriam Melnick]

Hi Nico,

Thanks. That's good to know. 

I think gracefully degrading performance on older devices will be an important component of my project. I also might draw a line in the sand and say you need a device made since ex. 2010. 

Thanks and have a great day,

Miriam