Topic: AGS engine Android port

[subspark]

Hey, Chris. Love the way AGS has become. Great work, great to see you still working on it!
One thing, though, I would like to ask.

Could you add touch controls to the engines next release? It's so much handy having that control method, instead of the dragging cursor around

Whoa! Hold up. You've missed out on a world of stuff. I recommend reading back through the release threads and catch up on what you've undoubtedly missed.
To point you in the right direction:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=42063.0

All the best! Welcome back.

[sharktamer]

Hey, Chris. Love the way AGS has become. Great work, great to see you still working on it!
One thing, though, I would like to ask.

Could you add touch controls to the engines next release? It's so much handy having that control method, instead of the dragging cursor around

This is pretty much a necessity. A good model is the way this works on the ScummVM Android apps, being able to drag your finger around the screen to pixel hunt, then tap somewhere to actually click.

This app is an amazing feat, having such an amazing library accesible on my phone and tablet is just so cool. With this change and a few other small changes, this would be absolutely perfect.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I agree.  The only other thing would be an option to add on-screen buttons (for right mouse click, F5,etc) for specialized functions.

[JJS]

That input method will be implemented soon.

In the meantime, have another daily. It fixes some draw order bugs on non-Windows platforms that stem from different qsort() implementations and their handling of equal values.

Also I found the reason why the hardware accelerated driver sometimes messes up the draw order too. Turns out that objects with the ignore_walkbehind flag set are always drawn in front of everything.

Furthermore the engine now builds on Mac OS X too and I started looking into iOS.

[subspark]

Thats the three letter word I've been holding excitement for JJS!
If you need Apple Developer tools, PM me or catch me on Steam again. We're a licensed developer and I can share an abundance of useful resources for your iOS port.
Good going man!

[2dMatty]

Exciting stuff here! Same as Subspark, I work as an Objective-C programmer so give me a yell if you're having issues as I'd love to help get AGS running on MAC and iOS

[sonneveld]

Furthermore the engine now builds on Mac OS X too and I started looking into iOS.

Nice, is this building against latest xcode?

[JJS]

I am not using the xcode IDE for the Mac OS port, but a makefile Packages I installed through fink are: allegro4 theora0 vorbis0 ogg dumb freetype2-dev . I had to fiddle around with dumb sources so that it would build aldumb (Allegro support).

Also I only have Snow Leopard and xcode 3.2.6 with iOS SDK 4.3 (or something) because that is the latest one available for that without paying teh big bux. I don't really think that matters though.

What I am doing right now is cross-compiling libraries, which is a lot of fun because of interesting syntactical differences between the Apple tools and GCC (like "__asm__" vs. "asm" :). Also the Apple assembler is some outdated version of the gcc assembler, joy.

[sonneveld]

Also I only have Snow Leopard and xcode 3.2.6 with iOS SDK 4.3 (or something) because that is the latest one available for that without paying teh big bux. I don't really think that matters though.

One of the reasons why my mac port is using SDL is because allegro 4 does not compile for osx Lion. It relied on deprecated apis for the graphics layer which Apple actually removed instead of leaving for all eternity.

I couldn't believe how old the latest libdumb is!  There doesn't seem to be a decent alternative though!

[JJS]

So they just remove libraries from the system and shrug it off that it breaks old applications? How nice. And Indeed I get a message in the console about the deprecated NSQuickDraw API when I run the engine.

Libdumb is old but it seems to just work because it doesn't have exotic dependencies.

[sonneveld]

So they just remove libraries from the system and shrug it off that it breaks old applications? How nice. And Indeed I get a message in the console about the deprecated NSQuickDraw API when I run the engine.

Well I think there's a bit more to it.  I believe it was deprecated from the first release of osx and was only available to aid in porting to the new platform.  Also, they never ported the api to 64bit.  Different philosophies vs Microsoft I guess.

[cianty]

Oh man... this is so exciting! The sheer thought of playing our games on my new ipod has me running around with excitement.

[Neole]

I came across this topic by accident from google so am not sure if Im asking a dumb question (Im familiar with AGS from 2005 but not the recent version or the android port)

Is it possible to make a standalone android application from an ags game? Just the way a person just has to download an ags game and not the engine separately, can they simply download and run a single game on android without needing to download the ags engine separately?

[DazJ]

I came across this topic by accident from google so am not sure if Im asking a dumb question (Im familiar with AGS from 2005 but not the recent version or the android port)

Is it possible to make a standalone android application from an ags game? Just the way a person just has to download an ags game and not the engine separately, can they simply download and run a single game on android without needing to download the ags engine separately?

Yes, this is my question too.

[Joseph DiPerla]

Currently JJS has not added a way to compile games into its own Android APK file for distribution in the market. However, I am developing an AGS market app for Android where a user can install AGS via that app and then download games which will install it properly.

Go here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.agsstream.diperla&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5hZ3NzdHJlYW0uZGlwZXJsYSJd

I am planning on adding support for commercial and non-commercial games. I am starting a kickstarter project for this. Eventually I will add a tool which will allow you to package your game and AGS Together and install it automatically on an android device so that you can submit the game directly to the google play store.

[DazJ]

I am planning on adding support for commercial and non-commercial games. I am starting a kickstarter project for this. Eventually I will add a tool which will allow you to package your game and AGS Together and install it automatically on an android device so that you can submit the game directly to the google play store.

That's what I wanted to hear! Keep up the great work my friend and let me know when this feature is available. Actually, do you have any idea at all roughly when this WILL be available?

[Joseph DiPerla]

Hehe. Should be a few months before it will be where I want it.

[DazJ]

That's brilliant news

[Neole]

"Eventually I will add a tool which will allow you to package your game and AGS Together and install it automatically on an android device so that you can submit the game directly to the google play store."

Looking forward to that! Its all android and ios these days, especially for point and click!

[DazJ]

Exactly. The concept of this is potentially ground-breaking in terms of possibilities and the Android at last receiving TRUE point & click games.