illwinter games - conquest of elysium 2 (question about fpu and opengl)

[snusmu]

hey all,


me being big fan of turn-based fantasy strategy, i was very happy to find out today that there's new game released by swedish strategy masterminds from illwinter games based on dominions 3 (which i consider best fantasy strategy game of all times) engine . the game is called conquest of elysium 3.


looking around for more information, i noticed one interesting thing, specifically that previous version, called conquest of elysium 2 is available for free.


i absolutely love these games but prefer playing openpandora to sitting in front of pc.


so i wrote them asking if they could provide COE2 sources so that i could try porting them to pandora:

hi,


i am huge fan of your dominions game. and i found conquest of elysium


3 just now which is amazingly interesting for me.


but since recently i am using only portable devices, and dont spend


much time with my laptop,


my question is, since COE 2 is free, would you consider providing open


source to it, so that i could port it to Openpandora devices? it could


get users interest to Illwinter software and increase sales a bit... ?


:]


also, just in case you find time to think about porting COE3 or/and D3


to Openpandora, it has 1ghz arm processor overclockable to 1.2 and


512mb ram and is specifically gamer oriented - whole community adores


old good software.


as for me i would definitely buy Openpandora version of D3 and COE3


and i am quite sure other users would. i think community really could


use more good commercial software at repo.openpandora.com..


thanks for your attention and your amazing work (and for reply,


whatever answer you can provide..)

and i got a swift reply:

Glad you like the games.


I could try to make a cross compilation if you are willing to try it out. I'm not very familiar with OpenPandora so I'm not sure if it would require any additional modifications. It supports OpenGL and hard floating point I guess.


Cheers,


Johan

now to be honest i dont have any experience porting or cross compiling software and i was writing them hoping to make a first go at it. (i am rubyist and know only basics of c)


so i am not exactly sure what to reply. i read that A8 has VFPLITE - does that mean it supports hard floating point?


also it supports GLES but not GL, right? from what i understood looking at http://pandorawiki.org/Porting_to_GLES_from_GL

 

[snusmu]

actually his answer is a bit ambiguous, but maybe he means cross-compiling dom3/coe3


hm, is it possible that one of those would work on openpandora?


i am quite confident about coe2, but dom3 and coe3.. those games are big.

 

[Farox]

You should take in consideration this things:


Optimal screen resolution is 800*480 -16 or 32 bit, but could be scaled down (640*480 and so on)


OpenGLES 1.1 or 2.0 is available ( not OpenGL)


a minimum of 256MB RAM (for old models) or 512MB RAM for the others


NEON istructions is available , common used compilation parameters ( -mcpu=cortex-a8 -mtune=cortex-a8 -march=armv7-a -mfloat-abi=softfp -mfpu=neon )


...i think hardFP is implemented by the A8 chip but is not in the Angstrom linux OS ( at the moment)

 

[snusmu]

thanks for valuable information Farox!


i replied him with information you provided.

hi Johan,


thanks for your reply!!! sadly porting can be a bit challenging cause answer to both questions is "yes and no"

openpandora's specifics:


OpenGLES 1.1 or 2.0 is available ( not OpenGL)

NEON istructions are available

common used compilation parameters (-mcpu=cortex-a8 -mtune=cortex-a8 -march=armv7-a -mfloat-abi=softfp -mfpu=neon )


hardFP is implemented by Openpandora's A8 Cortex chip but is not in it's Angstrom linux OS yet


still. portable devices like OP/Android phones could really be opening some new horizons for Dom3/Coe3..

and i got Johan's reply today

I have managed to cross compile an armhf version with standard opengl now.

I hope that will work for raspberryPi.

I'll see if I can figure out how to make openGLES run on standard ubuntu,

then it should be easy to compile for openpandora as well.


/Johan

 

[Farox]

Thank's to you for contacting the programmers...maybe we could play another nice series of games on our beloved Pandora.