Port possible? (grim fandandroido) - android

The dream is to run Grim fandango on my android,
And i stumbled onto 'residual' (http://residual.sourceforge.net/ it's a c++ application) and someone who made it to run on his nokia n900 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO9a5nTMHYI).
So for the question, would this be possible for android? My initial thought was the support debian and ubuntu and my android is faster then the n900, why not?
So before i spend days/weeks learning and getting it to work on my android,
I thought it might be a good idea to ask people who actually know about these things if its even possible.
And maybe how much work it really would be, in my head it's currently only:
make allot of Android.mk's
try to compile and fix errors still it works.
Which (if i don't get to many errors) doesn't sound to hard.
Any thoughts are welcome,
Thanks for reading!

I'd say your goal is totally feasible.
Residual seems to rely on standard C++ libraries, plus OpenGL and SDL. For the latter, there are actually several SDL Android ports out there you can take advantage of.
Somebody familiar with Android and the NDK could probably get Residual to a somewhat playable state in a few days (a proper port would take much longer ofc). If you're new to the platform however, you should be prepared to spend several weeks learning the basics of native application development in Android before tackling the project.

Related

Lua in cocos2d-x

I am new in cocos2d development. I developed some stuff on andengine on Android and I know C++ language. Now I want to rewrite some stuff from andengine and make it available to iOS as well. I am reading and reading and testing from couple of days, everything is just ok, but few days ago I explored Lua. I adopted language semantics, wrote some scripts and realized that in Internet there is a lot of usage of this language. It is so common that I cannot believe that I know about it from couple of days. So I thought that would be nice if I try to use it. I have only few questions for now.
Can I load some Lua scripts and use it in my cocos2d-x game (written in C++)?
What is the difference between cocos2d-x 2.x and new 3.x beta branch (about Lua treating off course)?
I think about Lua only as way to implement AI for now (is this so good idea or not necessary?). I think it could be good idea because it is portable and I can use very the same AI algorithms for different platform (andorid, iOs, windows, linux, web...).
Please just give me some light about usage of Lua in cocos2d-x, because I cannot find any sense tutorials. If there is something the headers are bad, or version is deprecated or something else which is really annoying when you have no clue how to use it.
Maybe better is to write entire project in lua?
In short:
Yes.
What do you mean?
It works.
As LearnCocos2D suggested, they cover too much and are not good questions. I suppose you're wondering if you would like to use cocos2d or cocos2d with lua. I suggest you take a look at quick-cocos2d-x, because you mentioned cross-platform AI and it worths to have a look.

Pros and Cons for Haxe and Kivy

I'm looking to develop an application for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and for Desktop no matter if it's web or standalone. Does anyone have experience with Haxe + NME or Kivy that they can share in detail?
I've been looking for something that can deploy to all platforms and these are the 2 best options I seem to have found. I'm not looking to make a game though. It's more like an app with a lot of touch listeners on images. Touch image then hide this, create that, and do a lot of math behind the scenes. I do however need a pathfinding library but pretty much all engines I've worked in had the A-star pathfinding library. I also need a slideView library so users can swap pages like they do on their smartphone desktop. Any information you can share on the following topic is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for reading and for any help provided. Sorry for the trouble
no experience with Haxe here, but I can answer for Kivy:
First, windows phone is currently unsupported, to my knowledge, no one attempted any port, it's probably doable, but it doesn't exist yet, and no core contributor have a windows phone device, so until that changes, or someone with that motivation comes in, there is low probability that it will happen.
For your interactive needs, Kivy would fit the bill pretty easily, being really focused on making touch handling per-widget easy to define. We don't have much information about your math needs, if they are heavy, you'll probably want something like numpy to be usable behind the scene, and/or use threads to do the heavy lifting without blocking the application, this can totally be done with Kivy, so i see no particular issue there. For A*, there isn't any implementation directly inside kivy, but you should be able to use a python implementation (there are dozens out there), if your needs on this side require more performance, you can cythonize it to increase performances, or use a C implementation compiled for each target.
Hope this helps.
long time Haxe user here, though personally I mostly use Haxe for web-app projects, not NME as much. Until recently NME's main focus has been (far and away) gaming. There has been a few recent efforts to create nice UI toolkits building on NME's cross platform strengths:
https://github.com/RealyUniqueName/StablexUI - Demo (works on HTML5, flash, native desktop&mobile)
https://github.com/ianharrigan/haxeui
but they are very recent additions, so if you're looking for a tried and tested solution Kivy (never heard of it before, but looks cool!) looks like it has a bit more maturity and a bit more polish going for it.
In terms of performance and overall reliability, Haxe/NME is great, but it's getting those native-feeling UI widgets that will be your pain point. Other than that though, it's an amazing language to work with :) Python's pretty good as well though... each to their own!
At the time of writing, people are experimenting with using Native UI (there is a talk at the upcoming conference about an Objective C target, and the Java and C# targets are becoming more mature, so there are your 3 main mobile platforms covered) so that could be an option if you want native ui components, though it's not ready yet, this is me just hoping that it might become reality over the next year or so :)
Good luck with your project either way! If you do choose to go with Haxe/NME, be sure to ask questions (either here, the NME forums, or the Haxe mailing list) so that people can help you on your way.

Image processing on Android Platform

I am new to android platform and have to do by B Tech project on this. I have to do product recognition and then process them. So, I need to do some serious coding on implementation of Image Processing on Android platform.
For this, I would require :-
Through understanding of Android programming
Setting up the environment for image processing on Android.
Finally, an emulator to debug my codes
So, I need suggestions for all of the above, like, what book I should go through for learning Android , what emulators I should use and can I use openCV libraries in my android application.
Regrading emulators, I have heard, that they are pretty slow and have lots of bugs. They keep on hanging. So, should I have an Android mobile then ?
Please comment, if, you are unclear about my question.
PS: I posted the same question here, but got no replies. So, posted it again.
Thanks !!
There are a lot of books out there, CommonsWare is a pretty good place to start for the basics, he has office hours (where you can ask questions) and comments on here quite a lot.
There is only one emulator as far as I know, most people use eclipse for their environment and it's fairly well integrated with the android tool set, but there are a few others, as well as command line tools if your prefer those everything you need for android development is here other than eclipse which is here
In regards to image processing I assume you mean image matching and yes there is an openCV for android there are also some commercial offerings if you don't want to try and sort through openCV
If you are going to be using a camera to do image matching then the emulator is not a great choice unless you want to be restricted to using it with a webcam (which is a pain to get working) you will still work a lot with the emulator though.

Is Titanium 1.8 finally free from the memory starvation issue from release 1.6 and 1.7

Hi there Im new to mobile application development. I had developed Android apps using Java and is just starting to get the hang of Cocoa Touch and Objective C. Now I am curious on mobile web application development to create cross platform/device applications which would at least run on Android and iOS(Apple devices: iphone, ipad). I tried Titanium and developing applications with this framework seems very promising. Although it is very powerful, popular, mature, documented and very easy to learn I had doubts investing time and to commit on using this framework for my projects after reading this blog which many Titanium users seems to agree with Why you should stay away from appcelerators titanium.
It seems that release v1.6 sdk and v1.7 sdk have the issue which they describe, the negative comments stopped right after the v1.8 sdk release was out.
My question is, is Titanium v1.8 sdk free from the memory starvation issue and other issues which were discussed on the blog post?
Would you personally recommend this for production use? And by the way I am using the 1.0.7.201112152014 Titanium build does this use the 1.8 sdk? Thanks in advance.
Take a close look at the progress of comments. It starts from people agreeing with him, and in the end everyone disagrees.
You can select the SDK you wish in the tiapp.xml editor, which is embedded in Titanium Studio. You should indeed use 1.8.x
The platform isn't, and probably never will be, memory issue free. But it also depends on how you build your app.
Stay away as much as you can from includes. And also stay away from creating a window/view/etc. with a file as url in it, this causes most memory issues because it's in a different space.
If you code well, you can use it perfectly without any issues.
Blog post author here. I don't fully agree with Topener - go ahead and read the comments yourself, it's just not true that "in the end everyone disagrees".
For what's worth: my experience is related to version 1.6.2. I've talked to people working with trunk and they told me that the memory issues are far from being resolved.
The only approach that seems to work is, as mentioned in the comments, the Tweetanium approach. But beware, that's not "if you code well". It's "if you code the way Titanium likes". If you take a look at Tweetanium (I suggest you to do it no matter what you decide to do in the end) you'll see that it has a very specific way to deal with architecture. If you follow that path, you should be good. If you think that the way Tweetanium is structured is good for you application, go for it. Be wary though, because (at least in what I consider to be complex) Tweetanium is not very complex, and with growing complexity I found that their approach is difficult to maintain. Again, evaluate for yourself.
Then there's the Android issue. Android support is far from optimal - Wunderlist decided to rewrite their Android version in native, I myself have had huge problems in making anything even remotely complex in iOS working decently on Android. If you need to support only iOS it's alright but, if that's the case, I don't see why you shouldn't write the app directly in Objective-C... considering also the (unavoidable) delay/mismatch between the Titanium and the iOS SDK.
Just my 2c. I suggest you not to take the decision lightly - it costed us a lot.

MoSync experiences

Does anybody have experiences from cross platform mobile app development framework MoSync?
It sounds very good and promises much. But does it deliver?
We have used MoSync for 8 months now and I have a good feeling about it. It is still magic to me that you code in C++ and out comes a jar-file or whatever platform you choose.
It is great for application development but I wouldn't recommend it for gaming with advanced graphics. It seems too slow for that on Symbian.
The APIs are very easy and I learned it very fast. And I have the freedom to do whatever components I want thanks to the MAUI framework and using widgets with skins. You can really make an application look very nice.
It is great for me as a developer that I can support so many phones and platforms. I can also do specific behavior and include/exclude functionality based on the phones capabilities.
When it comes to deployment I end up with hundreds of binaries for every device and I have to take care of them my self. To put them on a web server somewhere and make sure that every user get the correct binary when they try to download the app. I wished that they had some kind of app-store so they could host the apps.
MoSync still have a bit to go until it is working properly. There is no guaranty that an application that is build for a specific device actually works on that device. But I'm sure that they will reach there very soon. And when they do... I simply just need to rebuild my app with the SDK (I think).
Have you seen Mosync 2.6, I think this solves most of the problems you mentioned,
the feature list is at:
http://www.mosync.com/documentation/manualpages/whats-new-mosync-26-pyramid
I personally I'm quite excited about the whole HTML 5 integration, it sort of blurs the line between native and web app.
Hope this Helps
Tony

Categories

Resources