Wednesday, November 12, 2014

The New Roadmap for our LCARS Applications

It's no surprise that our LCARS apps are the bulk of our publicly available Windows applications. As such we are always doing lots of work on them to improve everyone's experiences across all platforms. This one is a bit long, but there's lots of good stuff towards the end!

Microsoft has been doing a lot of work to consolidate their Windows 8 and Windows Phone platforms lately, and we are working diligently to keep up with having our apps using the latest technologies, in addition to supporting the older versions of Windows Phone as much as we can also.

When it comes to Windows Phone, the path of least resistance would be to build a WP7 app that will run on WP7.1+, WP8.0, and WP8.1 just the same. We aren't going that route. Why? Well first off, we started out with just Windows 8! Then due to your feedback, we moved to WP8. Due to more feedback, we then added a WP7 app! Our wacky development path aside, we also think that if you buy a new phone, or Microsoft updates the OS on your existing phone, you should be able to get something new for it! While Windows Phone 7.5 is still a pretty good phone OS, it certainly doesn't have the same capabilities as WP8.0 or WP8.1. We want to take advantage of everything available on all platforms, and so we deal with supporting 3 versions of the Windows Phone apps. We have gotten very good at making this process more efficient though in terms of sharing code and being aware of platform differences, so supporting all 3 isn't as much of an effort as it was originally before we overhauled everything earlier this year.

So where do we go from here? Well, in addition to our LCARS Trek (formerly known as LCARS Simulator) game now being a Universal app that can be used on both Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone (7, 8, or 8.1!), we are looking to take even more advantage of Universal apps to add some value to those of you that use them!  What does that mean? Let's see...

LCARS Simulator is now known as LCARS Trek, Available as Universal App!

As the title suggests, LCARS Simulator for Windows Phone will now be known as "LCARS Trek" because it is actually a game based on the original "Star Trek" text game from many decades ago, and we have some future plans for things that are more simulation like! We just released an update to ALL Windows Phone platforms with some bug fixes and other visual tweaks along with the new name and icons. That means updates for WP7.1, WP8.0, and we also released a new WP8.1 version that has many performance improvements and is running on the new framework underneath that is the same one being used for the WP8.1 LCARS Interface app, which has a huge number of benefits...

Not the least of which is that "LCARS Trek" is now be a Universal app, which means that we also released a stand alone Windows 8.1 version of it soon! Those of you who purchased the Windows Phone version will be able to get this one for free without paying again, and vice versa! As with the phone version, it comes with an unlimited time free trial with just an ad bar at the bottom, and purchasing it on either platform will remove the ads from both. Universal apps are nice like that!

"LCARS Trek" will continue to be built into the LCARS Interface app for Windows 8, however, and will continue to receive any updates that this one does (since they are literally utilizing the same code base now), so there is no need to buy this one if you already have that one unless you are just itching to give us money!  This is just a way to add some value to those of you who purchased the game on Windows Phone who don't want to buy the whole LCARS Interface app on Windows 8 just for that.

The Windows Phone updates should be available already, or possibly later today depending on where you are. We hope to have the Windows 8.1 version ready to go within the next couple days, as we just need to finish up a couple things on the UI to make it work as a standalone app.


If you have downloaded either version (even just the trial version) please go and rate it for us!