Lair Larrikin
Posts: 23
Joined: Wednesday, 11th July 2012, 14:37
Android ASCII port
I've been working on a port of the console/ascii version of Crawl for the past couple of months in my spare time. I've now reached a point where it's somewhat playable (hopefully), and would like to share it with you to gather some feedback.
Here's the link to the Google project: http://code.google.com/p/dungeon-crawl-android/ . Check the downloads section for a .apk.
At a very general level, the (slightly modified) Crawl code is cross-compiled as a library using the Android Native Development Kit toolchain, which interfaces with the application using the Java Native Interface. Nearly all the application code comes from the port of Angband to Android.
At the moment, it's quite rough, so there's probably lots of bugs. There are a few known ones I'll mention here:
1. Colours seem different. At least, compared to the linux version
2. After installing the game, it seems to get a while to start up for the first time (like 10-15 seconds)
3. Actually playing the game seems kinda slow.
4. Characters aren't disappearing when they should.
5. No unicode characters (though I'm pretty sure I'll be able to fix this)
Ideally I'll be tracking bugs in the "Issues" section of the Google project.
Please note that I'm an Android developer first and a crawl player second. In fact, I wanted to make this port because I wanted to get into playing Dungeon Crawl, but I wanted to play it on my phone to and from work. Hence, if there's something that's supposed to happen in the game that's isn't happening, please tell me! Because I probably won't realise otherwise .
Regarding the Crawl code I used, I basically just got the tarball of 0.10.2 and symlinked the source directory to a particular directory in the Android project. I then realised I needed to symlink other things, like docs and assets, to other places as well. I tried to minimise any changes to the core of the code, and I've made a good attempt at documenting the changes that I did make. Ideally, I'll have a branch of the main code, perhaps even the same code frogbotherer is using for his tiles port, and have it so that you can just pull the code from this branch, symlink the code in the right places and compile.
Anyway, looking forward to your feedback .