u/chrisclan1903

First, credit where it belongs: this is entirely built on OpenRCT2. The engine, the simulation, the scenarios, all of that is the team's work and years of it. I forked it and did one specific thing: got it building and running as a native ARM64 iPadOS app, and wrote a touch control layer on top.

I went looking for a way to play OpenRCT2 on iPad and there wasn't a real one. No iOS build, and on Android touch is just tap-as-click. I wasn't sure why nobody had done it, so I tried, and it came together better than I expected.

What I added:

- A native iPadOS ARM64 build. No emulator, no x86, no streaming. The engine's software framebuffer is presented through SDL's Metal renderer.

- A touch gesture set built for construction: one finger to place, hold-drag to paint paths and terrain, two-finger pan, pinch to zoom, two-finger twist to rotate track and scenery, two-finger tap to remove a path segment, long press for secondary click.

Tested on a physical M2 iPad Pro (iPadOS 26.5.2): native landscape Retina runtime, importing your own RCT2 or RCT Classic data through Files and persisting across relaunch, scenarios load, finger + keyboard + mouse + trackpad all work.

Not there yet:multiplayer is disabled in this build, Apple Pencil isn't supported, on-device plugin and custom-scenario loading isn't proven, and formal framerate/stress tests are outstanding.

It's a source-only developer preview. No IPA, no TestFlight, no App Store. You build from source on a Mac, sign it to your own iPad, and bring data from your own legally owned copy. No proprietary content is in the repo.

Repo: github.com/chrissotraidis/OpenRCT2Touch

Unofficial fork, not affiliated with or endorsed by the OpenRCT2 team. Thanks for building the engine that made this possible.

Long-time WC2 player. I always wanted to play it on my iPad without a keyboard, a mouse, or streaming it off a PC, so I got the Stratagus engine with the Wargus data layer compiled and running natively on iPadOS.

It's not emulated and it's not streamed, it's the actual engine built for ARM64, rendering through Metal. Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal campaigns, skirmish, and save/load all work. Touch works: one finger to select and drag-select, two-finger tap for right-click commands, three-finger drag to pan.

This is a dev preview. No App Store build, you build it yourself on a Mac and deploy to your iPad over USB, and the full guide is in the repo. It uses zero Blizzard content, you extract the data from your own copy with the Wargus tooling, same as the desktop version. Multiplayer's in the engine but I'm still testing it on iPad.

Repo and build steps: https://github.com/chrissotraidis/peonpad