Darkplaces on Android

[motorsep]

[n0n3m4]

[LordHavoc]

Some parts of the official Android port were never finished due to performance issues at the time and the porting was abandoned, though it appears to be adequate to play Quake, it wasn't up to my standards at the time. So I did not check in the relevant bits and pieces of the ndk build process for it (which is a bit hairy), however much of the code was shared with the iOS port and both were built on SDL 1.3 (which now became SDL 2.0) so that both will converge to a solid code-base with shared handling of platform events, touch screen input and other considerations like GLES2 rendering.

Since those porting attempts, I have learned a great deal about optimizing the OpenGL geometry processing parts of the engine, including especially valuable insights from my time at Valve where discussions with vendors provided much insight (in both directions) about how to optimize a Quake-derived engine on Linux and elsewhere, and have started implementing many of these insights (in particular the new R_BufferData_Store function is the heart of a high performance rendering design for OpenGL on all platforms) and I see that Doom3 BFG Edition contains much the same pipeline for high performance OpenGL (although it takes the step of threading all the geometry processing which requires major architectural changes for best effect).

For iOS and Android porting I highly recommend using SDL2 (which is what SDL 1.3 became) because it has momentum in the right direction, it has rough spots but it's worth fixing the SDL2 implementation rather than avoiding use of SDL2, in the long run SDL2 is going to be the backbone of great multi-platform game development and warrants serious consideration.

Regarding the selling of GPL engines, I think this is more or less a self-solving market problem (for people to buy something it has to demonstrate significant advantages in usability and presentation over no-cost alternatives), selling commercial games with the engine included makes perfect sense to me however.

It's all too easy for people to think "hey I deserve some royalties" when they hear that their favorite project is being sold on an app store, but it's rarely going to be any significant sum of money at the best of times and a lot of good-will can be lost in fighting over shares of very little.

[Julius]

Cool that you provide some input, and great to hear that you are back into improving Darkplaces. Any approx. ETA when the SDL2.0 and those render speed-ups will arrive (for the PC version)? Would be great to have them ready for the next big Xonotic release.

P.S.: Any plans to merge the Android changes back into the main code base to have it all nicely in one repository?

[LordHavoc]

[Julius]

Ahh, thanks for the clarification. All the better then

[ceriux]

so i got my g/f a android tablet for christmas and i recently put https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... .Q4A&hl=en (qi4a) on it. the engine seems to run really smooth, but aiming and movement seems really weird. iv played other shooters on her tablet and it felt much better. does anyone know who develops this so i can contact them directly and give some feedback?