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Hi to Chris Priestman

PocketGamer

(Note that we will not be porting Emerald City as we don't have the rights.)

(Or Kings Quest come to that. )

Hi, this is Janet from Wadjet Eye Games.

We've recently started porting our games from PC to iOS. So far we have released Gemini Rue and The Shivah. Both of them have been doing well for us. We'd like to port our entire back catalog if possible - but it is a lot of work and we want to focus our time on our original games. With a baby daughter we have much less time these days.

This is where you come in! You are a skilled AGS scripter. You own a Mac (capable of running the latest XCode), a PC and an iOS device (4.3 and above). You will be altering the AGS source of our games to make them run nicely on iPhone. I've done two games like this so I can give you a complete tutorial on the changes we need.  You will be working in AGS script, and only using XCode to compile the game, so no Objective C or C knowledge will be necessary.

Rates: $1000 for shorter games, $2000 for longer games.

Interested? PM me.

Janet Gilbert
Wadjet Eye Games.

I was just looking at the process for porting our games to Android and wow, I found out pretty much what you say, Joseph, only I only got half way there! It looks pretty near impossible to do commercial games on Android

I was thinking it'd be as simple as the iOS build (which was basically changing some file names here and there) but it really is not.

You could do a sort of step by step for porting? I have read the entire thread several times but I don't understand where i have to start.
I have my own .exe, and then what?

Sorry, too busy with my new baby to write a walkthrough!

The exe you need to rename to ac2game.dat and put in a resource folder via xcode (along with any other data files) to be built into the app.

Another thing: there is a way to test the game without owning a jailbroken device or developer account ? Perhaps through an emulator like that of the Apple software (that for xcode)?

Yes, xcode provides an emulator with the iOS libraries.

I've never had particular problems with the limits in AGS. I could do with more room objects sometimes, but I just recycle old ones if I need more.

What do you need to do to export to the Windows store? Anything special? For Steam, we added a plugin to make use of Steam features such as cloud saves and achievements, but we could have uploaded it without anything extra if we had needed to. Perhaps you could develop a similar plugin?

I'm curious;  how will you have your programmer work on the engine, in terms of availability of sources?  Will fixes and improvements be worked on in the open (for example, in coordination with CW and JJS using the public Github), or retained internally to Wadjet Eye?  I'm working with other teams to do this same work (on a volunteer basis), and it would be ludicrous to run separate parallel development, though I fully understand the commercial need to not wait on volunteers

We want to keep everything that he (Edward) does open source so that everyone can benefit (including us!) I want to make sure what we do is compatible with the community's plans for AGS.

Hi all,

Wadjet Eye has now got a programmer (not me) working on porting the Mac and Linux AGS engine so that we can commercially release Gemini Rue on those platforms. I know that the Linux build is in pretty good shape, but what needs doing at the moment apart from the crackly audio issues?

Thanks!

I think that Wadjet Eye may be able to help here as we have got to the point where we are working with someone to port AGS to Mac. I've emailed you about it, Crimson Wizard!

What do people think about the possibility of changing the graphics library to SDL?

In the first page it still says that the port is for jail-broken devices only, but since you managed to put Gemini Rue on the app store, I conclude that you managed to work around that.
Can you share some information on that? Can we freely use the port to publish games to the app store or is there some ground work to be done?

Is your branch open to the public? Are your changes suitable to be merged into the main branch for other users?

If you want to use my branch, you are welcome!

As JJS says, it has some control changes to make it more suitable for Wadjet Eye games, but they also require scripting changes to make the best of them. For instance, I had to remove all right-click events because my version of the engine can't handle them, for simplicity.

It is set up to take only one compiled game script, which is compiled into the game, unlike the "real" version that requires jailbroken devices, and allows you to install as many compiled game scripts (.exe files) as you like. This is to make it suitable for the App store.

To sell a game on the app store you will need to get your own developer account and replace the references to my developer account with yours.

Considering the main coder for the port has had a baby, not really.

I'm not really the main coder, just used the port commercially. It's in a pretty good state at the moment (at least my branched version is) - Gemini Rue launched without too many problems.

Being able to change settings in the game itself would be ideal. I don't think there is currently a way to restart the game from inside the game - am I wrong? I would like to be wrong. I'd particularly like to be able to switch between windowed and non-windowed mode.

But I have doubts that would have much use apart from setting background image. Why would you change list/button positions for every other game?

This would actually be incredibly useful for commercial games. The problem with the current winsetup is that it confuses customers, since most of the options don't even apply for specific games. This is no big deal for AGSers because everyone knows what all the buttons do already.

Of course, it would be even more useful if you could change settings from within games!

Just thought I'd say thanks for all the help from the AGS port team in getting Gemini Rue on iOS, especially JJS who fixed so many engine bugs and answered so many questions!

Gemini Rue came out yesterday and is doing well

Now for the rest of our games!

Well, I am doing a preliminary convert to Allegro 5 now. I think I forgot to mention this on forums... I told this to Janet Gilbert and JJS & BigMC via emails.

Awesome!

That utility cannot directly chop off the engine though. It can only extract everything and then pack it again. It should be trivial to make a script that removes the exe directly (if you don't suck at scripts like me). It is certainly no problem with a hex editor. The engine exe ends with "PADDINGXXPADDING", the data starts with "CLIB". Cut must be made in between. Also the end of the file contains the offset to the CLIB start iirc. Edit: Yeah, it is the 4 bytes directly before CLIB at the end of the file.

I cut everything from the exe before CLIB. Seems to work. Is that right? I don't understand what jjs means about the "Also the end of the file contains the offset to the CLIB start iirc." - I didn't change that. Is that likely to cause problems?

Thanks for the information. Very useful!

I'm wondering if there's any way to build the engine so it doesn't require an exe file, but just the data file? This would be better for commercial games. Any thoughts?

How often does this happen for you? Was it occasional, or can be reproduced?

This has only happened to me once, during my last playthrough of Gemini Rue. It was while a dialogue audio file was being played in a cutscene. I cannot reproduce it, sorry.

I know JJS fixed some similar issues recently at my request, and I integrated his changes into my version of the engine. Here's one of them:

https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/commit/75517855f428ab517d520da90fbcae7f0c4e6490

He also made some other similar fixes to the iOS audio system, which were committed in January this year.

Got a crash on iOS Gemini Rue which stumps me... It was on my iPhone 4 with iOS 6.1.1.

I'm using a slightly customised version of the iOS port which can be found at

https://github.com/JanetGilbert/ags

Here's the stacktrace:



Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks!