Things might be taking surprising turns… I believe I mentioned iADOM (ADOM for the iPhone in 2009) and especially Jochen did some serious evaluation of that.We found some difficult to solve problems with iADOM, mostly two things:

1. The UI is really small (what a surprise). We might be able to work around that but we were not too happy with the preliminary play experience… it was not that fulfilling.
2. ADOM is not prepared to handle the various iPhone interrupts (like incoming calls… ADOM never was designed with the idea that you might need to save the whole game state while some input routine is waiting for your input… e.g. after you used a wand of wishing).

That caused us too stall… but too nights ago a rather trivial yet compelling idea hit me… I think we considered the wrong platform for iADOM. The iPhone is just not appropriate - but the iPad might be a much better choice.This really got me excited since I believe that there is a lot of potential in the iPad platform (and other mobile tablets, too - but the iPad is as far as I am concerned - the best place to start). And the iPad solves the problems mentioned above:

1. The UI is large enough. 1024×768 pixels provide ample room for the whole interface and the touch UI will allow for simple input of most commands. We have some idea for simplifications but I believe that most parts of ADOM will be able to work without changing anything.
2. There are no interrupts. The only interrupt is when you want to quit the game and that can be handled in the same way it is handled now.

So currently Jochen and I are toying around tangible ideas for ADOM 2.0.0 starting on the iPad. Personally I feel seriously revigorated by that thought - even superseding any JADE fiddling, for various reasons:

1. I love the iPhone platform and definitely want to get an iPad. I love the idea of being able to play around with ADOM on an iPad.
2. I find the business aspects of the iTunes store very interesting. Oh so many years ago we discussed the prospect of a kind of commercial ADOM Deluxe which never came to exist. Now with the iPad platform and infrastructure there no longer is a need for two separate versions. Using the Apple micropayment infrastructure it would be possible to get into ADOM and that activate various “Deluxe” features by paying a small amount of money. Additionally it would become a lot more interesting to provide add-on packages.
3. Porting ADOM to iPad will result in new regular ADOM versions… because there are bugs that finally need to be fixed and luckly the whole Apple coding environment is absolutely C friendly so that all bug fixes can be done in the regular ADOM codebase.
4. We are even talking to an investor interested in getting into iADOM. Keep your fingers crossed and wish us the best since we could need some financial support getting this started (as we have a real life where we need to earn money and anything taken from that for ADOM needs to be compensated in some way - and we need to buy into the iPad platform, etc.).

So I really hope that I’m not yet again creating another fruitless vision… but I *love* the idea of getting back into ADOM for the iPad. And for ensuing regular versions, too.I’ll immediately open a new thread in the forums in order to collect the most important bug fixes since my idea for the first version of iADOM is threefold:

1. Integrate it with the iPad UI.
2. Fix the most important bugs.
3. Get the “Deluxe” infrastructure for commercial exensions set up.

Later versions then will focus on new features and gameplay aspects, probably directed by some kind of voting system to get community feedback.So wish us luck… I really miss ADOM.