Projekt Weltherrscher - "Phase 2"

[Sascha Willems]

Well, that'd be my ultimate plane. I think a game like this is perfectly suited to be played on a tabled, so getting it up and running with Android (or even iOS) would be great. But I know that means a lot of work, but getting it to compile with Lazarus would be a big step in the multi-platform direction. And that's what I'm currently doing (out of curiosity), though Lazarus has it's share of problems with such a big project. Converting it fails each and every time with a different error, so I'm doing it by hand now. The biggest part of this will be adjusting the XML-parts, cause the Delphi XML-functionality differs from the implementation in Lazarus. But that's nothing that can't be done

And thanks for the kind words, always good to hear positive stuff on your own projects

[WILL]

Not to sound like a broken record of late, but... your best bet to get your game to run and perform well on ALL mobiles platforms (especially Android) is probably Oxygene.

Lazarus is great and all, but frankly it's Android support is not 100% Android compatable and if you do manage to get it going for *some* Android devices it would only work on the hardware that you designed it for. Your best bet, from any compiler on Android is something that compiles Java btye-code and the only Object Pascal compiler that does that is Oxygene for Java.

As Paul and I are both discovering that does mean you'll have to do some porting work on your code to make it more Java-friendly, but in all honesty depending on how you've written your code, it might not be that bad.

And as far as iOS and Mac OS X well Nougat works rather well and also compiled native code using XCode. I've tried it out and found it to be rather easy to setup once you know how. Personally, you'll have a much easier time with Oxygene for all things Apple overall as it uses Xcode, which allows you to do all your provisioning and submit to the App Stores via iTunes Connect. I'm not sure if there is an easy way to do that with Lazarus.

[Sascha Willems]

Well, that's what I feared (but thanks nonetheless for this valuable information). I only took a quick glimpse at the android support that FPC has to offer some months ago and it seems that not much has changed, so I guess I'll have to look elsewhere for that. But who knows, maybe Embarcadero's announced Mobile Studio (iOS first and then Android at a later point) will be the "weapon of choice" to get the game to android.

But what I can achieve in the short term are additional ports for Linux and MacOSX (glCapsViewer for example already supports these), and I'm pretty sure the changes I make to the project to get it to compile for Linux and MacOSX will make it easier to get them onto other platforms as well, so the time invested won't be wasted.

Right now I'm replacing all platform specific stuff. For the past 5 days I've been replacing all Delphi XML-Stuff (which is pretty nice to use but is based on MSXML) with the OpenSource NativeXML that needs no external libs and should work on all platforms. Though this affects several thousand lines of code it should be the biggest step towards getting the game to compile with FPC. The next step then is getting the rest (e.g. OpenGL render context creation) to support multiple platforms and I'll at least be able to offer versions for Linux and MacOSX.

Android may then follow at a later point, though I guess I'll have to put in a lot of work for the GUI the be usable with touch-based devices.

[WILL]

I will still say that with Free Pascal and/or Lazarus you have next to the best portability for your code though.

And even if you can't figure out how to rig your game for the App Stores on Mac, there is still gamer communities like Steam where I'm sure publishing doesn't require Apple's more strict validation process. You can also release the game under both Mac and Windows in parallel there too which would be easier to manage having only one distribution system to deal with.

[SilverWarior]

Desura http://www.desura.com/ alows distribution of games for Windows, Mac and even Linux platform.
As far as I know they don't have such strict rules for validation as their primal goal is also to distribute games which are still under development (great for indie comunity).
Their validation proces is mostly used only to prevent spreading of malicious software (viruses and such).
They alow you to publish as many patches for your software as you want and as often as you want. Only drawback of Desura is that their validation process takes sometimes even more than a weak to be finished, so publishing of patches through their platform isn't best as you need to wait for each patch to be validated and therefore wait for response from your gaming community to the latest patch. But even steam has patch validation the only thing is that their validation proces is usually quicker.
Another advantage of Desura (atleast by my opinion) is that while they do offer special software to alow of downloading, installing and keeping your games updated (similar as Steam client) they don't force you to use it. If you wan't you can always go and download a standalone instalation for desired game directly from their webpage.

[Sascha Willems]

I already took a look at desura, and since PJW is already listed at IndieDB I too think that this would be the easiest way to get my game onto a game distribution platform, so i'll definalty take a look at it once it's final. I hope that'll add even more players to the game's audience

And btw (sort of a historic moment) : After throwing out all Delphi XML-stuff (changing thousands of lines of code) and putting some ifdefs here and there I finally got Projekt W to compile with lazarus yesterday! And not only did it compile but it also worked and the game booted into the main menu without any problems. So next step is to remove the few windows releated things and get it to compile with Linux (and later one MacOSX). I hope to get a running linux build to compile this weekend.

And I also noticed that FPC / Laz have made big steps since my first attempts at trying to "port" my game over there some years ago. Linking and compiling is pretty fast and debugging, though not quite as nice as in Delphi is well implemented. With all the problems and limitations Delphi has this combo is getting more and more attractive

[Rodrigo Robles]

Yeah please let me know when the Linux version comes out!