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Does this still happen with the latest daily build? It is the same error described here: http://jjs.at/tracker/view.php?id=58 and I thought I had it fixed.

6) Port AGS to ARM linux, in case allegro is cool with that. Then do what Ben said

Done already Get Debian and follow these instructions to build a package. If you want sound, you have to install pulseaudio (sudo apt-get install pulseaudio). Works alright, but it is quite slow and audio lags noticably behind.

Thanks for the report! The issue with the plugins should be fixed now. Also new daily builds are available.

This popped into my Youtube feed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtNbr3FVulQ It's a nice playthrough of the demo.

Also... I am excited... for this game... You really... captured the essence... of Clock Tower...

Looking forward to the final game!

Download of the test game and midi patches should work again.

Code: ags

Code tags without a specified highlighting scheme are now drawn like regular text. I think it would make sense to have them either default to the AGS syntax or to no highlighting.

Another update...

The game screen now moves out of the way when the keyboard is shown in portrait orientation.

Update time!

- Added F1-12 and ESC key to the keyboard
- Loading indicator now stays centered when turning the device
- Mouse works correctly with the hardware renderer


Known issues:
- There is a race condition when turning the phone which can cause the screen to freeze
- Going to the desktop can cause the game to terminate (also a race condition)

Plans:
- Move the game screen upwards when bringing up the keyboard in portrait mode so that it is fully visible
- Menu for choosing games (if I can figure out how to change views )
- Settings, either rolling my own or integrated into the system settings


The update should show up in Cydia.

In my Firefox 12.0 it looks also messed up like in the screenshot. Works fine in IE 9 for me.

Yes, that is the reason. The ports are built on top of AGS 3.2.1 with no enhancements from any of the development branches.

1280x720? Is the game created with the regular AGS 3.2.1 or with a modified version? Because I don't think the standard engine can handle that resolution.

Thanks guys! 

Unfortunately the hardware of the iPhones < 3GS and iPod < 4g (or < 16 GB 3g) is pretty low spec, comparable to first generation Android devices I'd say. So performance is not that great.

Porting to a new platform actually gets easier every time. The starting point was already good with the Linux port in the original engine, then a lot of drawing issues got tackled on the PSP. All touch related issues basically are solved through the Android version. Therefore iOS was probably the easiest port to date. As for what's next? I think I am done platform-wise (unless someone donates me a PS3).

Well, the focus of my ports is on being compatible with existing games. If a new official version (3.2.2 or whatever) would come out I would of course accommodate to it but I feel uncomfortable about making possibly compatibility breaking changes that only exist in my version and not in the official branch.

So the idea is that the engine checks the config.txt file and then either downloads the game files from a given URL or unpacks the game files from the APK on the first startup? That sounds like a good idea.

Some issues I can see though:
- Can two applications have the same namespace? Ideally game developers would want to change it from com.bigbluecup.android but this would break the native layer interface (I think, not quite sure about it).
- Game authors would want to change the name and icon. Icons are hashed and probably checked against the hash at installation (didn't test this though). The name is in the AndroidManifest.xml file which is also hashed and also not human-readable in the APK.
- Game settings, how should they be implemented. It is possible to invoke the current settings dialog from within the game but some options need a restart of the game. Code to handle that must be written.

The signing makes me think that game authors still would have to get the SDK and do modifications there (namespace, icon, name, building standalone engine without the launcher). But at least they could bundle their game data directly.

I just uploaded an initial port of the AGS runtime to iOS (for jailbroken devices only at the moment).

Installation:
Add my repository to Cydia: http://jjs.at/cydia
You can then download the engine, midi patches and a test game (just a default "new game") if you want to see Roger walking around on your iDevice.

You can also get a build of the engine as an IPA file from here: http://jjs.at/daily . This will probably be updated more often than the Cydia repo, but there is no guarantee that every version found there will work.

At the moment only a single game can be played. It has to be placed into "/var/mobile/Documents/ags/game/". The main game file has to be named "ac2game.dat". The game folder must have write permissions for a standard user.

A file "ios.cfg" can be placed into "/var/mobile/Documents/ags/" to configure the engine, e.g. change the mouse control method or switch the renderer. There is no ingame way to change settings yet. The file has the same options as the Android configuration file.


Controls:
- The mouse cursor moves to where you touch down on the screen
- A short tap issues a left click
- A longer press (0.7 - 1.5 s) keeps the left mouse button pressed (for dragging things and verbcoin GUIs)
- A long press (> 1.5 s) opens/closes the onscreen keyboard (includes F1-F12 and ESC)
- Right clicking is performed with a two-finger tap

What does work:
- AGS games with version >= 2.50
- Sound and midi playback (download the patches for that)
- Accelerated theora video playback
- Software and hardware OpenGL rendering
- Snow/Rain, Flashlight and AGSBlend plugins are built into the engine (this is important in case the engine goes into the app store because its policy forbids loading external libraries)


What does not work:
- There is no way to press the ESC or F1-F12 keys -> now included in the onscreen keyboard
- Only one game can be played
- No ingame menu or settings


The source code is as always on gitorious: https://github.com/adventuregamestudio
It contains an Xcode 3.2.6 project. The custom build step is for fake-signing the package so that it can be debugged through the IDE. You have to change that to accomodate your setup.


I have only tested on the simulator and on an iPod touch 4g with a jailbroken iOS 4.3.3. Performance on that is about as good as on my Android HTC Desire (maybe a little faster).

I didn't include ESC because it is already implemented with a quick press on the "back" button. The exit dialog only opens on a longpress.

As for Al Emmo, are the files "audio.vox" and "speech.vox" correctly copied? I can reproduce the message if the files are missing. Apart from that, make sure that sound is enabled in the settings.

New daily.

- Added option to switch between relative and absolute positioning of the mouse cursor.
- Added option to enable holding down the left mouse button by performing a longclick (useful for dragging and verbcoin guis). The phone vibrates when the mode gets enabled. To deactivate it, tap the screen again.
- Added ingame menu from which you can press the F1-F12 keys.
- Changed invoking method of the onscreen keyboard to a longlick on the MENU button.

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.

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.

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.