Seventh Sense porting to Android

[Antokolos]

Hello!

I'm trying to assemble Android launcher for Seventh Sense.
Unfortunately, it is not fully working yet, but I have some success with it
More specifically, Seventh Sense launcher (with book selection, settings, etc) is working. You can go to the book selection menu, download the desired book and try to run it.
Then, if you have fullscreen checked in your settings and you have downloaded cover image for the book, you'll see this cover image and progress hourglass. When the progress is at 100%, program is crashed (e.g. no actual book interface is shown).
I can provide links to the source code (on GitHub) and assembled APK which you can test. Will it be OK (not sure about the license, distribution rules, etc)?

I can try to investigate this more, but it will be great if David or somebody familiar with the code gave me a hint to the entry point of code where I can set my breakpoints.

And thank you for Seventh Sense!

Best regards,
Anton

[Dave]

I'm excited about the idea of getting this to work on Android!

I've been in touch with Anton via email, and we've moved the repository to a private source code repository, until we can figure out how license stuff applies.

I'll investigate the crash on startup soon, and see where the best spot to set breakpoints would be.

[gdv82]

Hi Dave and Anton,
regarding Licenses and distribution, for Lone Wolf Saga I have to show the license on startup (and make players accept it); then, regarding the distribution, all the DB's reside on projectaon servers and have to be downloaded from here.

Last thing I was told when I started (I think you already know this), the contents must be accessible for free...

GDV

P.S.: Just my 2 cents from my experience in developing for Lone Wolf Saga for Android, and never having developed in "pure Java": The actual problem might be in how you create the "window" you show to the user.... Android works with Activities (http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html), and I think that those are specifics to the Android environment.... Plus, the Android FileSystem is rather different from a PC FileSystem, and I don't know specifically how that could impact the entire project

[Dave]

Thanks for the tips/reminders, gdv! I have no Java or Android programming experience at all, but we'll get it figured out eventually!

As for the "window", that is set upon loading book, before showing the book cover, so, since the cover is showing, along with the progress meter, it seems like the crash is probably coming from something else.

[Antokolos]

Some info about the launcher structure.
Launcher right now is simple Android program with two menu items:

Start game
Reinstall game libraries

Start game menu item starts SDLActivity, which actually launches Seventh Sense's native C++ code, compiled via Anroid NDK. So, when SDLActivity is fired, actually the original C++ code of Seventh Sense is doing all the job.
Regarding the file system: PhysFS binaries were also compiled via NDK, as well as CURL. So, Seventh Sense uses CURL to download book data, just like PC version. And PhysFS is used to interact with file system.
Probably game crashes when it is trying to access downloaded book zip file, maybe not, I'm not sure about it.

So, I hope, you don't have to look at the Java code at all The main task right now is to identify the point in the C++ code of the Seventh Sense where the application is crashed.

Seventh Sense code is located at the following path at the project code:
seventh-sense-android/modules/7ths_standalone/jni/src/p7ths/src

I've made some small changes to it.

Actually, launcher code is derived from my other project which uses similar scheme (Java launcher + compiled SDL native C code).
Here is the link to this project github.com/Antokolos/instead-android-ng

The main difference is: this, another laucher uses current stable SDL version 2.0.4
Seventh Sense's current launcher uses old experimental code for SDL 1.3. Maybe the root of evil is in this old code, but I haven't researched the possibility to rewrite the Seventh Sense C++ native code using SDL 2.0.4 (maybe it is not so simple task).