maemo.org - Talk - [Fremantle Maemo5] Aliens versus Predator (1999 Rebellion FPS) game engine port

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Aliens versus Predator (1999 Rebellion FPS) game engine port

There's a story behind this release...

Back in early 2010 I found my new love, my shiny new N900 :D. I'm not a proper dev, sys admin is my forte (although I do like to also think of myself as a semi-competent hacker) but one of the first things I played about with was with building stuff, initially on the device under EasyDebian, then later with the proper SDK rootstrap and eventually on my PC under Scratchbox (rather backwards, I know :P). Curious as I was, I wondered how hard it would be to port desktop Linux games to the N900 so I decided to look for something entertaining that no one had ported yet and came across Steven Fuller's Linux port of Aliens versus Predator. Without too much trouble I got it to build but then I had the problem of tracking down the game and finding a Windows machine that I could install it to in order to get the game data files to be copied to the N900. Eventually I got the little bastard running my N900. I soon found out about some of the N900's quirks such as that the Enter key actually maps to the Keypad Enter key and discovered where to fix it in the AvP source code. So I finally had the game running, the only problem was that it was unplayable, it was bloody slow. I wasn't ready to give up. I planned to do a Harmattan port thinking that maybe the better hardware would solve the slowness problem. Eventually I discovered that the problem was that it wasn't using hardware accelerated video and I would need to port it from OpenGL to OpenGL ES. After learning some GL/GLES and some lame attempts to port it, I gave up.

Fast forward to March this year and I happened to stumble onto this! My agony was finally over. I applied my feeble changes, encountered another problem, fixed that (or rather worked around it) and now it works full speed on the N900 at 600MHz! No lame life-shortening overclocking required!

You're probably wondering why I'm only releasing this now when I had this working 9 months ago. Well I did want to perfect it but never got around to it. There's still a problem with unreadable in-game text/menus and I haven't figured out why it's not working on Harmattan. I haven't looked at it since March and I doubt I will look at it again so I better warn you now that this is both the first and last time you'll hear from me about it. I won't be providing a deb package, nor will I upload it to the repos, nor will I provide a Thumb build. My modifications can be found here so feel free to finish it off.

By the way, here's a little hint. The unreadable text I mentioned was actually readable before the GLES port and I experienced the same problem with my lame porting attempts so it's probably caused by over-zealous GLES conversion.

See the original README for general info on how to get this running but here's a short summary from what I remember:

You'll need SDL and OpenAL (other missing dependencies can be found by running "ldd avp").
Use AvP Gold Edition (this is what I tested).
The game data files do not actually need to be renamed to lower case if you place them on a FAT32 slice (i.e. MyDocs).
Set the AVP_DATA environment variable to point to the directory containing the game data.
As well as remapping KP_ENTER, I've remapped the ESCAPE key to the COMMA key (this is possibly undesirable if you already use a custom key map).

Oh, and one more thing. I highly recommend you play this using Accelemymote as using the touch screen for turning is rather crap.

To overcome the TMO attachment size limitation I've split this up into 2 files. You can extract them on the N900 as follows:

Code:

cat avp1.gz avp2.gz | gunzip > avp

Merry Christmas TMO! Enjoy!