Inquery into the status of gemrb on android.

[Duncan Idaho]

Hello,

I have followed your project with great interest as I did not play BG and now have a portable option to play it!

I have it running, I have used v7 and now v8. 8 runs the best yet, but there is two things holding me back.

 

the first is the difficulty of paning the view around on small screens. The simple fix would be to double the travel distance per two finger swipe. the other way to go is get a version compiled that has the touch borders (they work flawlessly on the git version with "touch" in the name) working AND right click. I think you know already that right click got broke along the way on android. (could make right click the menu key?)

 

The other issue is that I seem to loose all my gold when traveling sometimes. I can explain if needed. has that happed to others yet?

My fix was to use the console to grant the lost gold. however i can not seem to make the commands like CreateItem("sw1h16") ... Or GiveGold(xxx)

cheat keys work, but i have yet to get a command to work.

 

So with that said id just like to ask how does the progress on getting gemrb compiled on android?

a while ago you mentioned a supprise comming, and maybe better proformance? is this still yet to come?

 

also i inderstand you are having trouble getting people to build on android. I am a good learner, if you could tell me breifly what kind of things i would need to know maybe i can go learn them... im no programmer, but have plenty of computer experiance.

I read the guides and got the software, but honestly i still dont know what i will need to know to get it done.

do i need to be able to interpet code?

do i need to write code?

can compiling gemrb be learned 0-finish by a non coder?

 

at the least maybe i can do some testing for you? i have an origional droid by motorola, and a htc inspire 4g (android).

 

I want this to happed for android, and i think you are correct, android will be a large part of you user base because its portable and did not get BGEE.

people love BG and i suspect if you dont see crowds crawlinh all over it is because its mildly hard to install (i saw you almost had a guy working on that last year....)

 

So great job and in conclusion, if i only get one answer i hope to find out if gemrb on android is as good as its going to be... or if I should wait to play through the games because fixes and improvments will still happen.

 

thank you for making this happen!

 

-Duncan Idaho

[Duncan Idaho]

Forgot to mention. My journey went like this...

I first tried one of the late 7 builds on the moto droid, this was amazing, but crashed all the time and had a user interface that was good either precision selection, or screen travel, but not both at the same time.

Then 8 came out and i was sad that the moto droid no longrr had the HW for it. my new acquisition, the HTC, was a good fit tho.

But the big difference that i feel most is the loss of the HW keybord.

 

now i am touch only, and fortunatly your new v8 has much imoroved touch function with the exeption of the scrolling on maps and text (very jumpy and hard to do the right touch on text, two finger drag is too slow) and the touch borders to move the screen (they work, but not like they did in the git version with "touch" in the title.

 

so now without my HW keybord i am really interested in using the vol, menue and other keys to take up the slack in controls.

 

but in a nutshell, it was awsome, then it got better. and now i want to play it, amd mostly can (as a pauper). so thank you and good work.

 

-duncan

[Duncan Idaho]

BTW sorry for the sloppy fast writing. I hope it is clear enough.

[SyntaxError]

The unfortunate reality of GemRB on Android is that we have no Android developer (sounds like you are volunteering!). We dont even have anybody that knows how to build for Android, so even a novice Android developer could do wonders for us.

 

if you were able to build from git for Android then right click should be just a touch and hold. There is also a virtual keyboard that you could use to scroll the map (I agree we need better UI for touch devices). The "touch borders" had to be removed because they were poorly implemented and caused problems with actual touch based input. Things would super explode trying to do swipes and other gestures that intersected them. We could maybe bring them back, but I feel like effort would be better spent elsewhere, or on alternatives (like actual buttons to do it).

 

Don't know about the gold thing, but I doubt it would be Android specific. Console commands should work on Android, but im not sure "GiveGold" is the correct command. Our next version has an improved console that will give feedback to erroneous commands so that will hopefully help.

 

The surprise was an OpenGL video driver that would (in theory) vastly improve performance on Android. We have that now, but of course we have no Android dev to add it to an Android build The driver is also incomplete and not as efficient as I had hoped, but it is a huge step in the right direction. Unfortunately we also lost the developer working on it, so it too has stalled out.

 

If you would like to attempt to help us, please join the IRC channel. We'll see what help we can give you.

 

BG:EE is actually available for android now BTW.

[lynx]

building for android shouldn't be that hard, as we have it scripted almost from the start and somewhat documented. But yeah, the rest of us have our hands full and we feel it'd be better if some other stuff matured first.

[Duncan Idaho]

I like scripts

It sounds like i need to attempt the android build. That will get the new stuff in and i can go from there.

Perhaps after that we can look into changing the sensitivity/travel of the two finger swipe? That would solve the screen movement issue and the loss of the touch borders would be a non point.when you lost your last android guy was that interface (knowlege of, i mean) lost with them?

I am sure I will find a plethora of questions seeking answers once i get this downloaded software installed.

Till then, thank you for the info.

[lynx]

look at android/. Everything is there, including a good README. If you get any compilation problems, just come on irc, things change all the time.

 

One of the immediate things that may require changing is making it use the released version of sdl2. At the time there wasn't any and android compatibility was regularly improved, so it is pulled from mercurial. It's trivial to change that, but it's hard to say if it is worth it without checking both the latest release and their HEAD. And if they're maintinaing their apis ...

[damian5000]

I tried the BG demo on the 2012 version of gemrb on Play and it was fine performance wise. No issues. This is on iNew V8 which has a rather modern GPU/CPU though. Cheap Android phones such as DG310 ($85) will run it no problem. (4 core CPU and Mali-400 GPU)

 

A shame there's not been a new version released on Play. I understand its a ton of work. Just would be great to see.