Making AGS more portable?

[edmundito]

This is kind of a wild question...

Can the interpreter be ported to Java? and if so, can you EvilTypeGuy do it? (if you know Java, that is.)

[EvilTypeGuy]

Yes I happen to know Java, but as I prefer to keep the same codebase as Chris I wouldn't consider such a thing.

Whatever language or decisions Chris makes is where I follow.

Unless of course he decided to go Visual Basic .NET  =)

[Pumaman]

Plus, "porting" it to Java would actually involve an almost total rewrite of the code, which is not exactly an easy job. Besides which, Java really isn't designed for real-time games, I have serious doubts that it would be fast enough to be playable.

[edmundito]

I just have a dream... that one day, AGS will be totally portable to any platform.

[Gilbert]

That kind of dream is for cowards, real men dream of the completion of the "make my game" function.

[monkey0506]

I'm afraid you're mistaken as well.  Real men dream of the day when computers (as we know them) will be obsolete because we will have personal robotic assistants with a telepathy plugin that allows them to run such trivial functions as "make my game" without us even having to lift a finger.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

You're mistaken too. Real geeks and real lazy folk dream that. Real men share Von Glower's dream of becoming one with the wild, enhancing our natural abilities and fine-tuning them. Real men go out in the nature to hunt and to commune and to simply experience, and to develop heightened senses which can only benefit them later on, apart from making them, in a purely physical (but maybe perhaps psychological too) sense, super-human.

[edmundito]

What if acwin was transitioned to something like SDL? Is the "AGSbytes" file (ac2game.dat) independent from graphics libraries and so forth?

I'm guessing that some issues would be playing movies and anti-aliasing... and who knows what the speed performance difference is. However, ScummVM works pretty well.

[Mr Flibble]

Real men dream of finding a truly caring relationship in which to spend their entire life.

Of course only if the "Make my Game" function was busy with the kids, or at work.

[scotch]

Changing a graphics engine is generally more than a "transition", I expect allegro specific code is found throughout AGS since CJ probably never intended to switch to another API.

Allegro supports all the same platforms as SDL anyway (except SDL has unofficial support for a couple of consoles), it's just finding people to do the ports that is hard.

[Paper Carnival]

Real mean don't even dream

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Is that so? In that case, real men can't be real.

[Haddas]

Real men dream about woman because it... they... BOOBS!

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

*sigh* Sadly, that IS what real men (as in, actual, living, existing men) do dream about...

[strazer]

Please stay on topic, people.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Sorry. I honestly don't see AGS in JAVA - all the experiences I've had in JAVA this far have been rather slow and clunky.

...and that's about as much input I can give.

[edmundito]

I don't think this is necessarily about porting AGS to Java, and perhaps I should change the topic accordingly. This is really about making AGS more portable.

[juncmodule]

Something that may be realistic for the future of AGS is C#. Simply because Chris said a lot of really good things about the language in a thread a week or so ago. I've been poking around with it and the language seems to be a really good starting language. Since Chris likes it and it allows porting to other platforms I imagine it is rather likely that a C# rewrite could happen at some point. However, Allegro and the slowness of the language always pop up.

Personally, I feel that porting the editor is not necessary. There are emulators that should be able to run the editor just fine if you really want to make a game with AGS that bad.

However, as a game creator I would love to be able to create games for all OS's. I kind of feel like the plug-in system should be removed from AGS, just to increase portability. Also, the module system seems to be working well (I'm so happy that CCS has been converted to it).

It would also be great if someone would start working on a Mac port. However, this may be all pointless talk. If Apple switches over to Intel processors it may be really easy to port the Linux version to a new Mac OS. Of course that depends on how dependant the Linux version is on the Linux OS. Have any Mac programmers made any serious offers to port it?

I think something like Java would be useless to port to anyway. I'm assuming Java is brought up to suit other platforms like PalmOS, WindowsCE, and cell phones. I think this is a pretty silly idea too. AGS games can range WAY beyond the capabilities of most of those machines. Perhaps years down the road it may be practical, but right now it just seems silly to port to anything but Mac and Linux.

Just my two cents.

later,
-junc

[Reko]

C# initially sounds like a nice idea, because on my fast, non-obsolete box, it's all speedy and nice. But on older computers (800mhz boxes than can run AGS games fine), .NET apps become slower and clunkier than Java, which in itself is pretty slow and clunky.

I don't see why, say, you couldn't make it so Linux devs could compile plugins to the Linux-equivalent of DLLs (.so?), then the Linux engine could just check for a .so instead of a .dll.

Of course, if all these ports are going to come out, isn't it going to make more sense to move all game data out of the EXE by default, more to another .dat file, making it easier for ports to parse data? That would be moving toward a more ScummVM approach, where the player provides the interpreter with the dat file, as opposed to it coming with it. Of course, a windows interpreter would still be distributed by default.

[Pumaman]

The feasability of a Mac port is currently under investigation. As you mention, because of the recent announcement that Mac is moving to Intel, it may well become much simpler to do a port for the new Intel Macs.