[airstrike] airstrike Debian patches

[Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

On Monday 05 May 2008, Erik Auerswald wrote:
> On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 07:33:33AM +0200, Michele Renda wrote:
> > First of all thank for your work. I want to say that I like your game
> > (I know that is more a tech demostration more than a game) and that I
> > think that is good and complete enough to be played.
>
> First of all, it's not _my_ game. It was started by Ulf Ekström and Eero
> Tamminen, I joined the project well after version pre6a was released.

Airstrike was started by Ulf, I joined the project a bit later.

Btw. I noticed that one of the things Ulf did before Airstrike, the
collision detection code (which is used in modified form in Airstrike),
was recently included into PyGame (Python SDL bindings).


> Regarding my "tech demo" statements, I do not want to raise expectations
> that can't be fulfilled. Airstrike did progress much, it changed a lot
> since pre6a. While pre6a is a simple game, the svn version allows for
> much more complex gameplay, but IMHO lacks the finishing touches to make
> it a _game_.
>
> > I am thinking to make a port of this game to Openmoko platform. Is
> > according you something possible? (as far I know there will be the
> > libsdl-image).
>
> Could be possible. Airstrike uses a fixed resolution of 800x600, so the
> grafics would need to be converted at least.

All the graphics have PovRay scene descriptions, it's simple just to render
them to different size.  Some co-ordinates in the level descriptions (game
object starting positions) need to be modified accordingly.  I could help
a bit with that.

Smaller level sizes mean that the game gets harder though because
there's less space for maneuvers.


> And it uses floating point 
> calculations, I don't expect Openmoko to support this. So I would say
> that some work is needed to do it, but even cell phones should be fast
> enough.

I've tried Airstrike on Nokia 770 a few years ago.  The speed is quite fine
even with floating point emulation instead of FPU.  >90% of Airstrike CPU
usage is taken by SDL blitting, calculating co-ordinates in floating points
is not really significant.


The main issue is that (especially current) Airstrike is a multiplayer game.
How multiple persons can play a game with the same phone keys?

Adding networking support to Airstrike would solve it, but would be
significant amount of work.  Should it be client-server or peer-to-peer?
Do you transfer only player input over network (can have either latency
or synching issues) or do you synchronize all difference in the game object
states (like e.g. Nil did)?


> Patches are always welcome, preferably against the svn version. ;-)


	- Eero