The more I play Carcassonne for iPhone, the more I like it. The other night, Christa asked if we could play it on the iPad, board-game style. Sure, you totally can - there’s a “local” multiplayer mode. The game isn’t iPad-optimized, so you’ll have to zoom it up to 2x. But here, the plot thickens…
This is Carcassonne on my iPhone:
And this is Carcassonne on my iPad, in 1x mode:
Notice anything? (Ignore that I zoomed in on the tiles in the first example.) The font looks pretty gnarly on the iPad. That’s a bummer, right? Except it’s not, because here’s what happens when you 2x the app: (cropped image)
The font is getting redrawn somehow, and it looks nice and sharp when zoomed up. Every other app I’ve tried simply doubles its pixels, resulting in a blurry mess. And it doesn’t stop with the fonts - look at the tiles. They’re 1:1 as well - crisp and detailed.
I am not a programmer, and the kind of programmer I am not the most is an OpenGL programmer. But let me venture some guesses as to what is happening here:
- Some forms of OpenGL will be drawn at 1:1 when zoomed up on the iPad. Carcassonne’s tiles and fonts are this form of OpenGL.
- Some UIKit controls will be drawn at 1:1. I’ve never seen this before with any other app, but it’s possible.
- Apps built with the latest versions of the iPhone SDK will somehow tweak some of their UIKit controls to draw this way.
- The Coding Monkeys coded Carcassonne so that it draws some controls differently on the iPad. The properly iPad-optimized version of the game is coming out later this year (and it’ll be a free upgrade from the current version, so it’s a steal of a deal) but this may be a compromise or evidence of partial work on their part. The Incident is currently in this state on the iPad - it draws at 1:1, but not everything has been tweaked yet. This theory would explain why things look crummy at 1x - if they’re saying “on iPad, draw this at 1/8 of screen size” then at 1x there aren’t enough pixels to look smooth. It would be a great compromise, as literally no one is going to play Carcassonne on iPad at 1x.
I admit I haven’t tried zooming up many games on the iPad, so this may be old news.
Whatever the reason behind this, it was a really nice surprise. Like I said, the game is already super-playable on the iPad.
P.S. By the way, how fortunate for the Coding Monkeys that the word Carcassonne is just barely able to fit the iPhone icon label. Imagine if it were a little too long - would it be ‘cassonne? C-ssonne? Carcass?