Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

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szopin
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Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

Post by szopin »

I am a bit on the fence, my attention recently went into other games, but coming back to arma every once in a while, it still is addicting. So lets hear your opinions guys. With almost noone playing, proper SDL2 port would allow Jolla and android users to join the game. Sure they will be noobs and will end up on fort without grinding blah blah blah. But the game is dying without new blood and some of them will love it and move to proper PC after getting hooked on phone (worst case scenario, add some ident to mobile client and option for serv to enforce PC client only, though don't think this will be needed, we have other tools)
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/dev/null
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Re: Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

Post by /dev/null »

A kind fellow ported it to sdl2 some time ago, it seems to have been forgotten though. I tested it and it worked great. You would probably have to search to find it, but it was less than a year ago iirc.

Heres the thread in fact, was easier to find than I expected

http://forums3.armagetronad.net/viewtop ... =4&t=23533
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compguygene
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Re: Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

Post by compguygene »

I am pretty certain that it will take more than SLD2 to port Armagetron to Android. As for IOS, the GPL libraries that Armagetron uses cannot be used in a app in the Apple app store. The licence is incompatible and Apple will take the app down if it gets approved in the first place.
If you follow the current discussions around here, there is talk of doing a re-write of the game in Unity, which would support a truly cross-platform game. The current development model makes adding development for mobile very unwieldy.
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voodoo
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Re: Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

Post by voodoo »

My 2 cents.

SDL2 support is already included in 0.4 as sdl2 branch as been merged and fixed by z-man. /dev/null provide the link with all relevant information.

Now android/ios support. There's much more here than sdl2 as gene mentionned but the biggest part is this:
- 3D code in the game: it use good old (and deprecated) immediate mode of OpenGL, the one from 1992 ... Mobile device are not compatible with this one so it will have to be ported to gles 3.0/gl 4.1 (luckily the former being a subset of the later), but wait, those are dying already ... vulkan/metal/dx12 are about to be there !

edit: whoops, not merge yet actually, see branch lp:~armagetronad-dev/armagetronad/0.4-armagetronad-sdl2
szopin
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Re: Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

Post by szopin »

Don't care about iOS/android (GLES on the other hand, yeah), sailfish on jolla is proper glibc, not bionic bs, so should compile nicely. Am willing to offer 100$ bounty (I know not much, but a start I guess) for GLES port? Check this out (glshim doing the GL->GLES automatically):
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=90922
http://talk.maemo.com/showthread.php?t=88473

Sadly on N900 even with OC it was about 15-20 fps, hope that with SDL2/Wayland dual core etc it can be now playable??? Willing to put extra 50$ on top if that is the case (the hardware keyboard (tohkbd) would be wonderful for that, no need to come up with double/triple turn buttons on screen hiding the action). From that android/ios should be easier which should bring a lot of fresh meat to the game (last few times I checked it did seemed to be dying D:)
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Re: Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

Post by Ratchet »

You know, I like the fact that you're offering incentives for people to try and expand the horizon of the game to mobile phones. However, I feel like I should point out that tron would make a terrible mobile game. All of the necessary elements like glancing, scoreboard, chatting, instantchats, etc. would never be able to be implemented without massive screen clutter. That's not even considering how hard it would be to play tron on a phone. If we made it so they could play with PC users they would get absolutely clobbered.

It'd have to be a standalone game where mobile users only played against mobile users.
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ConVicT
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Re: Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

Post by ConVicT »

What if the point of the mobile version was only to pop in and chat to your friends, say, on the way home from work just to say "hey, guys, I'll be on later, never believe what happened today, blah , blah, blah".
And maybe you don't have to play, you just observe/spectate and tell people well done and whatnot.
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Re: Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

Post by sinewav »

Ratchet wrote:YAll of the necessary elements...would never be able to be implemented without massive screen clutter.
Not true. GLTron looks and plays great on mobile. Are you going to play Ladle on mobile? No, but then again why would you want play a serious tournament on your phone/tablet?
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Re: Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

Post by compguygene »

Just a reminder about the current and hopefully future state of Armagetron. Porting Armagetron in its current state to Android would require quite a major re-write. The devs have already indicated as much. Lucifer has piped up and talked about post .4 re-writing Armagetron to work with the Panda3d 3d engine. This might not be the best choice as Panda3d itself has not yet been ported to Android, although some people have tried to work on it and expressed an interest in it. No matter what decision is finally made by whatever devs decide to work on things post .4, the point is that none of this is going to happen until after .4 is released as a stable version.
When I have looked around at what issues there might be about porting this game to Android and/or using a new 3d engine you immediately run into 2 problems.
1. Most devs seem to want to maintain the purity of the the FOSS that this game is and use FOSS libraries, but I haven't yet seen a FOSS 3d engine that will support Android and/or IOS (IOS is probably never going to happen as the Apple store is incompatible with FOSS and has delisted apps that are FOSS.
2. If we aren't going to use a new 3d engine then the current one will need to be recoded to work with OpenGLES 2.0 or higher. This is going to be a lot of work and may neccesitate a developer actually charging for the app to make it worth their while. Personally, I and I bet a lot of other people on this forum would be happy to pay $1-$2 for an Android and/or IOS (if possible) version of the game.
Maybe a Kickstarter for this to pre-fund a dev's time in exchange for a free download?
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/dev/null
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Re: Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

Post by /dev/null »

[quote="compguygene"][/quote]

That would require pretty much starting from scratch. It would never be the same game.
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Re: Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

Post by aP|Nelg »

sinewav wrote:
Ratchet wrote:YAll of the necessary elements...would never be able to be implemented without massive screen clutter.
Not true. GLTron looks and plays great on mobile. Are you going to play Ladle on mobile? No, but then again why would you want play a serious tournament on your phone/tablet?
You might want to play a tournament on your android netbook you bought from china...
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compguygene
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Re: Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

Post by compguygene »

/dev/null wrote:
compguygene wrote:
That would require pretty much starting from scratch. It would never be the same game.
What has been discussed in several threads has been exactly that. As a practical matter, nobody seems to be coming forward to do that. Durf seems to be working toward his own lightcycle game that will be written in WebGL and will borrow heavily from this game. But, like I said, in this game .4 needs a release first.
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Re: Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

Post by Z-Man »

compguygene wrote:Most devs seem to want to maintain the purity of the the FOSS that this game is and use FOSS libraries
Just so nodoby gets surprised maybe later: I'm not strictly one of them. I'm pragmatic. A closed source engine is not too different from a closed source OS. To the player, hacker and developer, it does not make too much difference whether the engine is FOSS or not, as long as they can build their own version of the game themselves. And as long as the game code is available and open for modification and redistribution, that is the case. Oh, and the engine should be readily available, good and either reasonably bug-free or under a liberal license that allows you to fix any bugs yourself.

Now, of course, anything building on top of our current codebase strictly needs to stick to the GPL unless someone wants to track down all contributors and ask for their permission to change the license or yank out their code.
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compguygene
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Re: Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

Post by compguygene »

I am glad that you are clarifying that in this topic, Z-Man. It was pretty clear in the topic about Unity that you would support a proprietary 3d engine if it made sense.
Personally, I am hoping that some people that want to contribute but have been shy about it see this topic. Relistically, if anybody wants to contribute to .4, they should ideally start their own branch on launchpad, do what they want with said branch, and offer it up to be merged. Alternatively, if that is too much, patches have been added in the past by being posted to these forums. Putting up a branch that can be easily merged will make it a lot more likely that your code will be used. Getting into the AUTHORS file of this project can be a help for your resume.
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Re: Possible bounty for proper SDL2 port

Post by /dev/null »

third party engines dont have the required collision detection for this to work in any meaningful way anyways.

I hate to be a party pooper, but we have been "talking" about remaking tron for what, almost twenty years now?
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