> Have you ported a desktop title to mobile? It is NOT trivial.
I created and maintain a cross-platform wrapper library (several over the decades actually) which among other platforms supports macOS and iOS, so I have an idea what's involved.
This is a game that renders its own UI, it only needs to use AppKit/UIKit for creating the application window, and from then on hand off all rendering to Metal. When you already have working 'Metal-heavy' macOS code, porting to iOS is indeed trivial these days, the Apple-specific code is at least 90% identical between macOS and iOS.
The main difference is mouse input vs touch input, but that's also not a big deal for an RTS since it only needs 'click', 'zoom', 'pan' and 'dragbox-select'.
> If it was so trivial, why hadn't it already been done?
Because maybe the author of the original Linux+macOS port simply didn't care about iOS or didn't want to put up with the messy iOS development workflow in Xcode?
I created and maintain a cross-platform wrapper library (several over the decades actually) which among other platforms supports macOS and iOS, so I have an idea what's involved.
This is a game that renders its own UI, it only needs to use AppKit/UIKit for creating the application window, and from then on hand off all rendering to Metal. When you already have working 'Metal-heavy' macOS code, porting to iOS is indeed trivial these days, the Apple-specific code is at least 90% identical between macOS and iOS.
The main difference is mouse input vs touch input, but that's also not a big deal for an RTS since it only needs 'click', 'zoom', 'pan' and 'dragbox-select'.
> If it was so trivial, why hadn't it already been done?
Because maybe the author of the original Linux+macOS port simply didn't care about iOS or didn't want to put up with the messy iOS development workflow in Xcode?