Forum index VCMI Project - Heroes 3: WoG recreated
Forum of the project aiming to recreate best turn-based strategy ever!

FAQFAQ  SearchSearch  MemberlistMemberlist  UsergroupsUsergroups  StatisticsStatistics
RegisterRegister  Log inLog in  AlbumAlbum  DownloadDownload

Previous topic :: Next topic
Android port
Author Message
lssjbrolli 

Joined: 25 Jul 2011
Posts: 20
Location: Romania
Posted: 2012-06-29, 17:45     

please try running your original H3 at 1920 × 1080 and tell us how it goes...
 
     
sonyzz

Joined: 27 Jun 2012
Posts: 5
Posted: 2012-06-29, 18:58     

lssjbrolli wrote:
please try running your original H3 at 1920 × 1080 and tell us how it goes...

and why i need to do that?played on 1600x1200 and going good :)
 
     
Dragon 

Joined: 27 Jun 2012
Posts: 4
Posted: 2012-06-30, 13:14     

lssjbrolli wrote:
please try running your original H3 at 1920 × 1080 and tell us how it goes...

https://sites.google.com/site/heroes3hd/
 
     
Tow dragon 
VCMI Programmer


Joined: 01 Feb 2008
Posts: 980
Location: Kraków
Posted: 2012-06-30, 16:18     

I see no one bothered to look into our wiki... http://wiki.vcmi.eu/index.php?title=VCMI . For those who don't want to read a few sentences more: our primary goal is making creation of mods easy.
_________________
:)
 
     
sonyzz

Joined: 27 Jun 2012
Posts: 5
Posted: 2012-06-30, 20:49     

Tow dragon wrote:
I see no one bothered to look into our wiki... http://wiki.vcmi.eu/index.php?title=VCMI . For those who don't want to read a few sentences more: our primary goal is making creation of mods easy.

can you make update for android vcmi,because pelya left it, you see android is popular os and every homm3 fan would like to play it on android if someone make update and take small dotations for 1-2$ it will earn money for that update :roll: its just need fix save load issue :-/ left it when it will work fine not give hope and kill that hope of game, or make your new official vcmi android,because vcmi is your project :->
 
     
Warmonger 
VCMI programmer


Age: 24
Joined: 07 Jun 2008
Posts: 696
Location: Warsaw, Poland

Posted: 2012-06-30, 21:10     

But Andoird port is a fork, NOT our project. As far as I know, no team member has even Android device. In fact entire thread is only about that.
_________________
DJ Warmonger blog
 
 
     
sonyzz

Joined: 27 Jun 2012
Posts: 5
Posted: 2012-06-30, 21:13     

Warmonger wrote:
But Andoird port is a fork, NOT our project. As far as I know, no team member has even Android device. In fact entire thread is only about that.
then release your official vcmi for android put it on market for 5$ or more for one copy :-> no one in team,then friends have android phones :-> a damn if i have any programing skills :-(
 
     
majaczek 

Age: 24
Joined: 12 Jun 2008
Posts: 455
Posted: 2012-07-01, 00:18     

Damn it! VCMI team even do not collect money from donations ! They think it's more problem dividing the money fairly than the gaind would be .... stop yelling about money it won't help anything .... VCMI team isn't greedy and they have another aims - if you find a Dev with android device willing to help whole project, maybe it help a bit about android port...

Android port is stopped because the version pelya made is much diffferent than it then was VCMI and it still were buggy - even support for LINUX DEVICE is problematic for them if it is a phone with 800x480 resolution - leave Android port alone! And the main problem is there have to be somebody to test between releases on real target device - You need to convince at least 3 Android Devs to help VCMI project to have fair chance of Release version of VCMI for Android. And once it would be done they need at least 15 people to testplay the incomplete version to catch the bugs...


The whole aim of the project is support future mods - if you have been known how hard is core modding on ERA you would understand it. Once VCMI would reach version 1.0 and there would be official mod support for VCMI, the support for more town types or anything such complex would be (almost) trivial in VCMI and it took them about 3 years to add new town type to SoD/WoG and it still have hidden bugs (what could be other reasons for not supporting ERM on HoTA? The 3.59 alfa were supporting town partially but it frequently crashed on ERM and new town type interaction).

Bless the VCMI team! They took rational way of recreating mos of SoD engine in the time it could took with fiddling with original exe to add just one complex feature :D - it may took even more time but we have Heroes3-compatible engine with complete source code -Yeah!
 
     
Tow 
Project Lead
VCMI Programmer


Joined: 01 Feb 2008
Posts: 1155
Location: Kraków, Poland
Posted: 2012-07-01, 01:17     

majaczek wrote:
Android port is stopped because the version pelya made is much diffferent than it then was VCMI and it still were buggy

We have no right to complain about bugs in the port if VCMI itself is so buggy.

sonyzz wrote:
can you make update for android vcmi,because pelya left it, you see android is popular os and every homm3 fan would like to play it on android if someone make update and take small dotations for 1-2$ it will earn money for that update :roll: its just need fix save load issue :-/ left it when it will work fine not give hope and kill that hope of game, or make your new official vcmi android,because vcmi is your project :->

Hello sonyzz, welcome to the board.
I'm sorry but I don't have good news — you should not expect to have a playable port of VCMI on Android soon.

At the moment our first task of uttermost importance is completing implementation of H3 mechanics and fixing bugs. We still lack of some features (campaigns, some spells, etc) and others need fixing or further development. As long as VCMI is incomplete and lacking in quality, there is no reason to play it on any device — Android, PC or whatnot. I think that Android port came too early. VCMI is just not complete enough to provide a pleasant entertainment.

Therefore even if I had an Android device, I probably wouldn't use it to develop an Android port of VCMI and publish it. However, as soon as we get past the missing functionality milestone and move towards tweaking engine, providing modability, and so — then we will certainly support any endeavour to port VCMI to other platforms.

Please understand and thank you for interest in our project and feedback! :-)

majaczek wrote:
Bless the VCMI team! They took rational way of recreating mos of SoD engine in the time it could took with fiddling with original exe to add just one complex feature :D - it may took even more time but we have Heroes3-compatible engine with complete source code -Yeah!

Thank you for your continuous support :)
_________________
VCMI is a work in progress.
VCMI is NOT an another mod.
 
     
majaczek 

Age: 24
Joined: 12 Jun 2008
Posts: 455
Posted: 2012-07-02, 17:15     

Well I would happily play VCMI on my linux phone during bus travel... if only 800x480 resolution would be supported. Not having to get out the laptop in the bus to play homm3 is always a feature... and you would have one tester more. Could fullscreen scaling become a feature somehow during one of GUI rethinks? (we have at least 3 of them yet if I remember and we would have at least a few more :P). HD-Ready (1280x720) Tizen phone isn't going to be soon in my pocket (Tizen is linux too or at least I heard so).
 
     
Tow 
Project Lead
VCMI Programmer


Joined: 01 Feb 2008
Posts: 1155
Location: Kraków, Poland
Posted: 2012-07-06, 00:32     

majaczek wrote:
(we have at least 3 of them yet if I remember and we would have at least a few more :P)

Well, that depends on how you count them. I'd say we are at third iteration.
1) First GUI implemented for pregame (VCMI 0.2)
2) Second GUI implemented for adventure map (and everything except of pregame).
Full of multiple inheritance and methods listing which parts should be activated/deactivated/shown/deleted.
3) Redesigned GUI — unified base class for GUI object, tree-like hierarchy so the controls know their children and can automatically handle their activation/etc.

Recently Ivan done quite a work on GUI but I wouldn't call it a rethink. It's rather finishing what I've left undone and making the whole system cleaner and more robust.

majaczek wrote:
Could fullscreen scaling become a feature somehow during one of GUI rethinks?

Naive implementation of scaling would be independent on GUI. If we did all the blitting onto helper surface and then downscale it and show on screen, it would be transparent for GUI. However I'm afraid that it would be too slow, especially if we talk about phones that can hardly handle VCMI (especially moving hero and battles are CPU-intensive). And it's still probably not trivial enough to just check it out.

We'll eventually have to implement hardware-accelerated drawing. It'll solve issues with drawing efficiency and allow efficient scaling. But then — it's a work for a longer perspective. Sorry. :(
The good news is that all that GUI work should make eventual transition easier.
_________________
VCMI is a work in progress.
VCMI is NOT an another mod.
 
     
rohezal
HoMM3 Fan

Joined: 29 May 2010
Posts: 16
Posted: 2012-07-12, 12:51     

Most phones today have a gpu inside. Even the cheap via 88500 android tablets have a Mali GPU which should be able to scale a surface. So it wont take to much power from the cpu. How do you render currently? Directly to a framebuffer or are you using a double buffer?

Maybe you can render to texture and put it on a quad. Not sure if this would take a lot of overhead, since the quad scaling and displaying done by the gpu. Like compiz desktop in Linux.
 
     
Ivan 
VCMI programmer

Age: 21
Joined: 08 May 2009
Posts: 630
Location: Ukraine
Posted: 2012-07-12, 20:57     

Quote:
How do you render currently?

Software mode only. No hardware acceleration at all.
Why? Some of H3 animations heavily rely on paletted images. Which no longer have hardware acceleration in modern GPU's.
For example water animation on adventure map or border around monsters during battle. Rewriting this into GPU-compatible way requires time and skill.

And read last paragraph from Tow's post once more:
Quote:
We'll eventually have to implement hardware-accelerated drawing. It'll solve issues with drawing efficiency and allow efficient scaling. But then — it's a work for a longer perspective. Sorry. :(
The good news is that all that GUI work should make eventual transition easier.


And by the way:
sonyzz wrote:
and why do we need pc version vcmi for heroes 3 :DD if there is pc version of heroes 3 itself

For example to do this:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/22372764/vcmi/vcmi-sharpshooters.png
It took HoTA team several years to implement features like this.
And it took me half an hour to do same in VCMI...
 
     
Val-gaav
Guest
Posted: 2012-07-13, 22:36     

Actually i think one of the things noone mentions is that h3 was done for using it with mouse. Touch interface needs adjustments to make the game enjoyable and easy to use as with mouse. Those will.be harder to do then porting the code.

As for resolution i am posting this from.android device that has 1280x800 and i think such high res are becoming a standard for such devices so imho soon 800x480 will be minority.
 
     
majaczek 

Age: 24
Joined: 12 Jun 2008
Posts: 455
Posted: 2012-07-22, 12:30     

My 600Mhz ARM one-core processor, easilly handles games like doom, wolfenstein, duke nukem and hexen, provided the engine is comiled natively, and with latest setting it overclocks to 900Mhz on demand (on N900s CPU have good margin for OC).
Sure CPU related blitting is a problem, since dosbox here chocked on Titus the Fox ingame and once double size scaling by CPU is disabled and naive GPU accelerated scaling (overlay mode in SDL) is enabled it got so much boost it even not chockes on Another World's intro video (DosBox is DOS PC emulator so it handles much less than phone using linux itself).

I know that pixel by pixel blitting of DEF or mixed pallette images couldn't be helped much, but I'm sure blitting whole surfaces using default SDL blitting API would be accelerated if only proper mode would be checked on SDL init. Of course proper GPU accelerating would need a bit more hassle but there are easy steps. I know just checking directx_fullscreen mode on allegro have increased FPS substantially over standard fullscreen mode with no altering the code (allegro blit functions and surfaces are automatically accelerated if mode allows and applicable elsewere).
I remember SDL hanged before on N900s on just overlay (the most primitive accelerated mode) but it's ages from them and it's fixed and I'm sure it would handle much more via native SDL support.
I suggest making configuration file beeing able to choose mode in which SDL inits (current compiled DosBox seems able to do only "surface" and "overlay", but on PC it allowed much more and I am sure it uses SDL), and choose hardware resolution as different than software one (for SDL apply scaling), which would at least allow accelerated scaling from game buffer to screen. (HW Res have to be 800x480 on fullscreen but software one can be virtually anything provided at least "overlay" is checked in SDL init).
Go with this and I can check if it is enough for me to play fluently, if it fail I (and all N900s owners) would be able at least play current vcmi version at all (currently we have only fheroes2, a heroes2 clone, and non-functional old version of vcmi).
If there's not much volounteers I may try to write a patch but my allegro experience is small to medium and SDL one is virtually non-existent.
 
     
Display posts from previous:   
Reply to topic
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You can reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You can download files in this forum
Add this topic to your bookmarks
Printable version

Jump to:  
Quick Reply
Username: 


Expire Days
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Powered by phpBB modified by Przemo © 2003 phpBB Group
Template Chronicles modified by Nasedo modified by Tow.
© VCMI Team
Page generated in 0.09 second. SQL queries: 11