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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

I can understand not supporting iOS 4.x. Memory management got a whole lot less annoying with ARC (automatic reference counting) in iOS 5.x.

But there are a lot of people, myself included, who won't upgrade our devices to iOS 6 because we want a Maps product that works and, you know, has public transit directions. Until that changes I'm staying on iOS 5.

It's a shame. I'd buy this in a heartbeat. I love to support actual games (social "games" not being games by my definition), which seem to be becoming increasingly rare.

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They actually are working on iOS 5 right now according to their mailing:

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition for iPad is currently English only, with additional languages coming in a free update. The iPad version also requires iOS 6, but iOS 5 support is coming soon!

I could understand this sentiment if the iOS device in question was an iPhone, but do you really rely on Google Maps' directions to help you navigate on your iPad while you're out and about on the road?

For a game it's even more puzzling because the odds are high this was all done in some C++ framework and barely uses Cocoa.

I know as a developer I'm not even thinking about iOS 6-only releases until the middle of next year. Which is a bitch because dealing with the iPhone 5 without autolayout is no fun at all.

I suspect the reasoning is to prohibit first gen iPads.

> For a game it's even more puzzling because the odds are high this was all done in some C++ framework and barely uses Cocoa.

The iPad 1 has 256 megs of RAM. The iPad 2 has 512, The 3 & 4 a gig.

"Requires iOS 6" is the easiest way, as a dev, to get the store to enforce the requirement that your app needs more than 256 Megs to run comfortably.

For comparison, the original version of Baldur's Gate required 16 MB of RAM (32 MB recommended).

On the other hand, I think that ran in much lower resolution and in 8bit color.

If you still have the original disks, you can recreate the magic with GemRB.

http://www.gemrb.org/wiki/doku.php?id=start

I believe the default was 640x480x16 bit. I am not sure whether you could up it to 32 bit 1024x768 but I know you could in BGII. Still have my disks somewhere.

Note that 256 megs is how much physical RAM the iPad 1 has; the amount available to the foreground application is much less than that. Indeed, on the iPad 1 you're lucky if you have much more than 100 Megs to yourself while you're running.

And, as others have said, higher color depths will make some difference, and no doubt the port puts a lot less effort into RAM conservation than the original did.

All your points are correct, but when the original version required 16 MB of RAM it wasn't expected to be able to dedicate all of that to itself either.

Per one of the devs on Twitter, a lot of the difference in base memory requirement is that the original expected to have a significant swap file to work with on top of those 16 megs, while the iPad app has no such luxury.

Just because you refuse to move with the times doesn't mean the developer wants to be stuck with you.

In all our apps the people hanging on to iOS 5 is about 10%, and it's shrinking all the time. So there's very little incentive for the dev to bother putting in the time and effort to try and sort out whatever issues there are on iOS 5 / performance issues on the iPad 1.

Google Maps web UI for IOS still works fine. You can even make it an icon right under the new Maps.

ARC isn't even an iOS feature... it's a compiler feature.

weak refs in ARC require OS support

You can always use PLWeakCompatibility on iOS4: https://github.com/plausiblelabs/PLWeakCompatibility/

Perhaps you are greatly overestimating how much "a lot of people" actually are.

I don't know. My mom who is by no means a technical user was carefully avoiding the upgrade for a month on her iPad, just due to the bad news about maps in mainstream news. (And Then she accidentally clicked yes on an upgrade nag notification, and spent the rest of the day discovering broken stuff. Not just the maps, but e.g. the Youtube app and all the browser bookmarks disappearing).

I'm pretty sure your mom doesn't represent 'a lot of people'.

No one represents a lot of people, but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of people holding off on upgrading to iOS 6.

Actually, iOS 6 has awesome maps... of the world of Baldur's Gate.

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