[aquaria] SDL2 patches...

[GMMan]

>Isn't the steamworks SDK available only under an NDA?
That's the whole point. Alec and Ryan can make the library referencing
Steamworks, while Aquaria itself only interfaces with whatever library
that contains possible Steamworks code. The idea is to separate Valve
NDA code and Aquaria game code into two pieces, and only merge the
Aquaria code, filling in the gap with a dummy library that manages
achievements locally.

>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.
Well, making Aquaria open source defeated the DRM already, considering
people could compile their own copies into what is arguably better
than the Steam version. It's the data that is restricted, not the
code. If you haven't bought the game, you don't have data to play the
game with, regardless of where you got your executables from.
--GMMan


On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 10:14 AM, False.Genesis
<false.genesis at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
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