[aquaria] Unofficial PSP port

Andrew Church achurch+aquaria at achurch.org
Wed Jun 16 08:58:19 EDT 2010


Dunno if anyone's interested in seeing Aquaria running on the PSP, but
I've been working on that for the last couple of weeks; it's now in a
(barely) usable state, so I've pushed it to:

    http://achurch.org/cgi-bin/hg/aquaria/

on the "psp" branch.  It's still (1) slow and (2) prone to running out
of memory (see the PSP/README file), but with sufficient saving and
restarting it is possible to progress in the game.

[Advance warning before anyone goes diving into the source:  A lot of
the code is taken from an engine I wrote for a different game, in which
I used Japanese as the comment language.  Apologies to anyone who isn't
bilingual. (: ]

Prerequisites, build instructions, and other notes are listed in
PSP/README.  In particular, make sure you check the sections about data
files before you try running the game, or you may find yourself sitting
at the initial "Loading" screen for minutes on end.

One major issue that (if resolved) could help with the memory problems
is that every Lua script loaded by the game is run in a separate Lua
state.  I admit I'm not well versed in Lua myself, but it looks like Lua
defaults to making variables global; if those could all be localized to
each individual script, the scripts could presumably then be run as
threads in a single Lua state, which I suspect would save a fair amount
of memory -- each Lua state seems to take 100k+ of memory, and when you
only have 52MB to start with, things get tight pretty quickly.

Any comments or questions, let me know!

As a side note, there are a few general gameplay patches in that
repository as well, all on separate branches.  Ryan, feel free to apply
any that interest you. (:

  --Andrew Church
    achurch at achurch.org
    http://achurch.org/


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