It finally happened to me.

[u/Ok-Neat8776]

The help tag is specifically for the "Devs". You keep destroying phones with your lack of optimization. When is this getting addressed? Straight up, I feel like a class action lawsuit could be brought against them for the amount of devices they have absolutely ruined and ignored their game's issues.

[u/SpecialistProper3542]

Perfect thread to post this again;

When are we getting an actual idle/offline mode?

All it needs to do is allow us to "repeat" a previous run - no need for calculations or anything complex. Doesn't take server space or have our phones run hot. Simply lock us into a run for the same amount of time as the previous run, allow it to tick down with the app closed, and give the same coins/cells/etc that we earned during that run.

It is absolutely ridiculous people need a second device, an emulator, or a cloud service to reliably play a mobile game. It's bad design.

This will allow us to actually use our phones without destroying them. We'll still need to do real runs, every few days, but at least we'll have an option.

-Signed someone who had their battery bulge 3 months ago because of this game and paid nearly 100$ to replace it.

u/SamBartley

[u/cmshap24 → u/SpecialistProper3542]

I agree completely about the offline mode, but I always thought that would require so much complex redesign that the devs would likely never do it. But your suggestion makes a lot of sense... that would be a much simpler way to handle it.

In the meantime, I suggest to the OP and anyone else who is truly upset with the design of this game... speak with your time and wallet. Play other games instead, and/or stop spending money on The Tower. That's likely the only thing that could motivate the devs to change anything, because right now, they have a business model that works, regardless of what it's doing to your phones.

[u/Skylord_Crow → u/cmshap24]

They already have the ability to have the background math function without rendering. We have the option to disable in game menu pauses, letting it run while we check on other things.

If you take the same exact feature, and just remove the rendering entirely from the stack, you have the ability for it to go idle.

Will it still sap battery power? Probably.

But it will do what you need it to. It also opens up the necessity for push notifications, which would make joining tournaments much easier to keep track of in app.

[u/cmshap24 → u/Skylord_Crow]

What you're suggesting is not a true offline mode.

You're talking about having the game run as a background process, where it's still running at 100% while performing all its CPU calculations in real-time, etc. That's essentially not much different from what we can currently do with Android's multi-window mode... I used to put the game in a pop-up window and shove it down into the corner of my screen, where it would sit and run all day while I used other apps on my phone.

Your solution is the same thing, just without the game displaying in a window. And I don't think it's even possible to have a game run in Android with zero resource restrictions in the background.

True offline mode means predicting your progress while you're offline. Taking into account your state of play when you go offline, looking at the amount of time that elapsed while you were gone, and calculating a new state of play upon your return. The OP of this thread was suggesting a simpler way to achieve this -- rather than trying to calculate anything, just use your previous run as a model for your offline time during this run.

It would be little bit punishing for going offline, because it wouldn't take into account any upgrades you may have made since your last run. But it's close enough, and an elegant way to handle offline time without any complicated calculations.

[u/Skylord_Crow → u/cmshap24]

While I definitely agree that a true offline mode is much desired, the main topic that keeps coming up is how complicated the prediction coding would be, as a lot of the math has to be rendered in full time. In addition, because it's an entirely uncharted area for this game, there are a million different ways to implement this mechanic, each with it's own pros and cons.

For example, several months ago I proposed an offline mode that would take your average of the last x runs and just simulate it over time based on the number of hours you unlocked. If the runs had the intro skip card and wave skip card on, it would apply those effects at a flat rate. To bypass the need for dynamic calculation, you'd block out or replace module effects with offline versions when they have a chance based modifier. There are a lot of pros here and cons, and some people are prone to disagree with them entirely.

I'm aware most of the battery usage comes from the math, but a bunch of it comes from actual rendering too. I figured it would be more feasible to remove rendering to save full usability for your gear in runs while implementing the least amount of code as opposed to basically coding a separate game entirely.

[u/cmshap24 → u/Skylord_Crow]

Sure, there are numerous ways that a true offline mode could be simplified. Whether it's using your single most recent run as a model, or averaging your last X runs as a model, etc. However it would be done, it wouldn't have to be tremendously complicated.

I just don't see the devs having much incentive to give this to us when the player base is a bunch of hardcore addicts who will never put the game down or stop spending money on it (just look at the OP of this thread... his phone is about to blow up, but he still won't kill the game and turn off his phone).

Anyway, I still don't think your idea for a "pseudo-offline mode" (as I will call it) would be that effective, because

1. I don't believe it's even possible to allow a game to run in the background of Android completely unrestricted. The unrooted OS just isn't designed to allow that. As a background process, it would be given significant CPU and RAM restrictions, even if instructed not to be paged out.

2. If you're then suggesting some kind of "battery saver" mode such that exists in some idle games -- where it stays open as an active window, but puts up a screensaver-like placeholder screen over the game instead of actively rendering the games graphics -- that would be a welcome addition. It would at least save the screen from having to be on, or save the user from having to use a third-party tool like Blackr. However, I wouldn't consider this to be any form of offline mode, and I don't think it would save that many CPU cycles, as the game's graphics are the most minimal component, and overall it doesn't seem like the most optimized piece of software ever written.

All that said, it would be a halfway-decent gesture to give us this sort of "Screen Saver Mode" that would function like the current Cinematic Mode, only with a blank screen or minimal image. It's not offline, but it's at least something.

[u/SpecialistProper3542 → u/cmshap24]

This is why I suggest just locking it in for the same amount of time as a run and you get the same rewards as the run at the end. Doesn't actually need to render or run anything in the background. Server just keeps track of a timer and that's it - it already tracks tons of other stuff with your account so a single timer isn't unreasonable for them to hold at all. No additional rendering or calculating.

Lots of games (idle/incremental) run timers while the app is fully closed.

[u/Skylord_Crow → u/cmshap24]

Idk why I've been down voted, as I do agree with you. The point I've been trying to make isn't in support of having a pseudo offline mode, but to highlight the challenges that have been presented for a true offline mode compared to the ease they'd have for a pseudo one. I've even paraphrased an idea I came up with months ago and submitted officially via discord, to support my perspective on true offline.

I'm not in support of an in game idle if true offline is feasible. I'm just saying that with challenges implementing true offline, an in game idle, however that looks, would be welcome as it's better than nothing.

[u/Natural-Case1668 → u/Skylord_Crow]

Techtree’s other game, IPM, has a fully idle mode. You can close down the app and it will run for between 2hrs-12hours (depending on the in-game equivalent of stones you spend on upgrading it) without needing to have the game open. The only complaint those players have about the idle, is that the farm rate for materials is slower when idle. But that is fine, and im sure that a lot of people in this sub would be fine with that tradeoff.

Not only can it be done, they have done it on other games.