Clonk Planet For Gp2x 0.1 - Public Beta

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I don`t care how late it is! If you put this out tonight, I am not going to sleep... this is awesome. Daid, you live in the netherlands right? I guess I will see the release tommorrow. Oh well. I am not going to sleep anyway, I am way too hyper and bored. Lucky I didn`t get banned for that episode with sam fisher on the spam forum.



BTW: *remote punches sam*

 

[PeterW]

Didn't find this thread at first, thanks to Yoni for pointing me here. To reiterate, I'm one of the developers of clonk. Porting our game to a portable platform has always been subject to much discussion, so it's great to see that someone has actually made it work.

So if anyone could tell me some good starting points with playing, I haven't found any infos how to get started, I just walked around, trying to kill some sharks just to later flood the sea with oil.

But one thing I found really annoying was the 'Walk right until press down' thing. I'm not confortable with the gameplay mechanics neither the original game, but I don't think this is too user-friendly. But Maybe there is a good reason for this which I just haven't seen yet.

Well, it helps to consider that Clonk has been a player-vs-player (using one keyboard) game in the past, so it's still somewhat geared towards that direction. You will find a lot of worlds that simply aren't meant to be played alone. This restricted the controls somewhat, too - keyboards stop to register key presses when too many keys are down at the same time. So the game was designed to work without the need to keep any keys pressed. We're working on some new control modes, however. It will seem more familiar for players not used to it - new alpha versions of Clonk Endeavour already support it.

Which brings me to CE... We already ported it to Linux officially, without hacks such as this Delay stuff (alpha version available here). The graphics are OpenGL-based as of now, but I'm quite positive adding SDL won't be that much of a hassle. We already have a pretty good abstraction layer for graphics (currently one for DirectX, OpenGL, and a dummy implementation for dedicated server). To get a taste of how this works, you can have a look at the CE source code (doesn't include Linux support yet!). I'm not quite sure, though, wether the more restricted color space of the GP2X will get in the way. I have really no idea what the platform is capable of.

You won't have to build a new frontend for CE, btw - the new engine already works without it. The long-term plan is to reduce the current frontend to some kind of developer tool.

So, any thoughts?

 

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well that sounds awesome. I guess Daid will continue working on the current port though, since it`s still quite uncertain if CE will run on the gp2x.

The hardware restrictions we have to deal with:
- No FPU... Daid replaced alot of sin and cos functions with lookup tables (for example the algorythm that rotates the windmills wings and other objects)
- Not a lot of RAM. Daid is now using upper memory, too which makes a theoretical total of 64 mb ram, but there are some offsets that mustn`t be overwritten so that`s quite tricky.

That are the restrictions which will also be hard to come over if porting CE to the gp2x. But you already said, that the game is way more optimized than clonk planet right?

If you would be able to add SDL to the engine, that would be awesome. Somebody would then port it to the gp2x (maybe Daid, again? He seems to have fun hacking the source) and you could get a few more people to register clonk and play.

 

[Daid]

Please: http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=31632
(That's the version 0.2 release topic, it's newer)

But to comment, if the GFX layer is abstract then I don't need an SDL layer on top of it, I rather access the hardware then directly and just write to the framebuffer. (As I do with my latest development version, still use SDL for input and sound there)

Some of the largest problems I see are:
-I don't like the GFX of Endeavour, and thus will have less fun with playing/porting it. (And I'm not the only one, my little brother also directly went back to Planet after seeing Endeavour. "Eeuw" where is exact words)
-Endeavour uses anti-aliased GFX/alpha blending. This doesn't go very well with the GP2x as the hardware doesn't accelerate that. (as far as I know, but the blitter is new ground for me, but I haven't seen anything that would allow me to do it, maybe with some tricks)

(And I rather don't say "CE" that confuses with Windows CE )

And working on the frontend is kinda fun. With the C4Group class from the engine it's pretty easy to access the clonk files to read info.

 

[PeterW]

Please: [...] (That's the version 0.2 release topic, it's newer)

Oh well, seems I have no luck with finding threads. As the discussion doesn't comment on your port directly anyway, I hope noone will mind if I continue here.

It's true of course that the engine uses alpha blending (plus additive painting, some gamma tricks and color blending, for that matter). I figured hardware acceleration might be pretty standard for a game console. Well, I'm not an expert, obviously

It may be possible to remove most of this by refactoring graphics and such, but that will sure amount to lots of work. Seems Clonk Planet is the easier target here. The "problem" is we can't help you there much, because the current code base is ages away from Clonk Planet. Porting features back will be hard.

But if you enjoy porting Clonk Planet, by all means continue doing it. I consider C4Group one of the worst parts of the engine, but that may be a matter of taste

 

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the newest release of clonk2x is really fast. Daid managed to correct a lot of bugs and do a lot of optimization. He really seems to enjoy it. 0.9 is fully playable and support some extra goodies now, the next release will also offer a basic scenario editor to make the port complete. Check back if you are interested.

 

[PeterW]

Well, I don't own this console, so my interest is more of theoretical nature

Btw: As suggested somewhere else, you can drop us a line when you have something that is presentable. I think Matthes might want to post a news item on the main page about this.

 

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cool! That would be great. Might bring the gp2x to the attention of other people and video game enthusiasts.

If somebody plays clonk-planet on the gp2x, I bet they will get interested in buying a copy of Endeavor and playing online and with all the features ;-)