Earl Weaver Baseball, the heavyweight of baseball simulations in the late 1980s and one of the titles that helped create EA Sports, is being ported to the iPhone by its original programmer.
I don ‘t know how I missed this one. I ‘d never heard of Earl Weaver Baseball before today (though I absolutely remember the man himself and his Orioles teams) “ but it sounds as if it was a great game back in the day.
I ‘m a huge baseball fan, so any baseball games and apps are always of interest for me “ and if this is a real classic that apparently lends itself well to the iPhone, I ‘m very keen to see it.
The game will be renamed on the iPhone OS to ‘EWB Baseball ‘ as the game ‘s developer owns the rights to the original game engine, but not the use of the name.
Apparently, the plan is to release a relatively simple port of the game initially and, assuming it achieves a decent level of sales / success, to then add enhancements in future versions
The game will be released with a relatively simplistic design at first and, assuming it makes enough money, will be followed by a more advanced version later. Says Dombrower:
For the first release, I intend to leave them pretty much as you see them in the screen shots. If time allows for the initial release, I ‘ll begin to add texture mapping to fill in the stands, improve the look of the grass and dirt. The animations are, in my opinion, strong enough for the resolution of this device.
Now, assuming that the game gets some traction and proves to generate some ‘real ‘ revenue, here ‘s the second phase of the plan:
* convert the hand-created flat polygon renderings of the field and stadiums to openGL technology (which I can use elsewhere too)
* spend some time re-engineering the ‘Director ‘ to pick better shots
* provide users with additional options for visual playback using the camera (the engine supports user defined camera positioning, but this was turned off for igiBall)The ‘background ‘ behind the stadium uses photos to provide city scapes and mountain scapes, and so on, and I plan to allow users to put their own photos behind the stadiums (currently 2 photos per stadium). That should allow us to, as a community, create the feel of the actual cities these ballparks live in.
There is no word as yet on an expected release date for EWB Baseball. I know I ‘ll be watching out for this one though.
For lots more detail on this, see the posts at CrunchGear and Kotaku
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