[aquaria] SDL2 patches...

[False.Genesis]

> 1. On the Steam page, could there be an acknowledgement that the
> engine is open source with an address to where one could get the
> sources, if code from the open source repo is used?

I agree, that's a nice idea. But I don't know if steam supports that.
Any idea of how many other games (except the HiB #1 ones) on steam are 
also open source? How do others handle it?

> 2. I think the different code bases for Aquaria on different platforms
> could be consolidated.

At this point the changes are most likely too severe to be merged, 
unless it's done line-by-line by hand. I'd help out with this if it ever 
happens.

> I know at least I and one other person here would
> be interested into porting the game to other mobile platforms, and
> having a proven GLES engine would make it much easier.

Raspberry Pi !!

> 3. For the Steam version, if the Steamworks components can be spliced
> into a separate library, it could allow the actual game code to come
> under open source territory. This would be beneficial as the codebase
> would be more consistent (see above), and new code can be tested on
> Steam without having to be the original developer to do so. I don't
> know what Valve's policies are on this, but I've seen Unity 3D games
> use a separate assembly for Steamworks related code, so if one had
> access to the game's original source code, he could modify and
> recompile without having to touch the Steamworks portion. Right now
> Steamworks is used pretty much just for achievements, so having a
> "dummy" local library for the open source version and another
> Steamworks library for Steam would, in my opinion, work just fine.

Isn't the steamworks SDK available only under an NDA?
But good point, I also had that idea earlier, given an API that provides 
the necessary features, one could optionally hook up a DLL that does the 
steam interfacing. (But I bet commercial interests are in the way and 
it's not permitted to do this sort of thing. Steam is, by design, a very 
effective form of DRM, and making it entirely optional sort of defeats 
the purpose.)
As a starting point one could try use a custom steam_api.dll that logs 
API calls with params and passes them to the original steam_api.dll.
But OTOH I don't know anything about steam's internals; there are other 
people who know this a lot better -- especially the developers of the 
OpenSteamworks SDK, which may provide what you're looking for.
If someone has the time to look into this that'd be awesome, I know I 
won't have for the next few months, but I'd definitely support such an 
undertaking.



Btw, SDL2 works really well, no problems found so far on win32. I 
noticed that keys are now correctly translated (I use german keyboard 
layout), without breaking some of the more "exotic" keys; but have yet 
to test it on Linux. With SDL1.2, the map editor was unusable on Linux 
due to being extremely jittery.

Unrelated:  I'm just finishing up an implementation of real positional 
audio, replacing the hack I did last year. Keeps biting me that the game 
mixes mono and stereo oggs for sound effects and OpenAL chokes on half 
of them, but what can you do.