Notices

I would really like to ask some kind soul to port Hedgewars to Maemo (N900). Considering, that is the absolute pinnacle of worms clones -in fact, Hedgwars are better than even the most glorious worms releases like Worms Armageddon or Worms World Party - and that it works using QT4, I'm really surprised, that we don't have working port, for all those years.

If someone doesn't know - Hedgewars is much more than worms clone. It's the one and only continuously maintained FOSS game of this spirit which is very active in multiplayer, got many interesting and fresh game play modes (almost to the point of becoming platform for creating other games - including things like racing [!], galaga-like [!!!], and many others), and works on other portable devices (Androids, iPods, you name it) for ages.

Sure, we have Wormux (working without any FPS problems), but it's unmaintained, unfinished, bugged and development ceased completely (including that it's home page doesn't exist anymore). Hedgewars, OTOH, have very active community of players, developers, and supporters:
http://www.hedgewars.org

Now, there was some very early attempt at porting:
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=962940&postcount=4

...but it hit performance problems. Hoever, it seems that compilation options might have been totally unoptimized, not to mention that it was eons ago, using much older version.

Any skilled (in compiling) gamer up to the task? I would look at Aapo Rantalainen, but he is quite busy, lately, and anyway, he ported so many things, that I don't have guts to ask him for another one...

Cheers,
/Estel

Hedgewars can be installed under Debian (shameless plug ). I've not tried it but it's likely to have the same performance issues.

I would assume the performance problems are due to lack of hardware acceleration rather than compilation options. It probably needs to be ported to GLES, or if it's using OpenGL 1.x you could try running it under glshim instead of porting it.

Hedgewars is pushing a GMA 950 (with an N270@1024x600 or a T5600@1280x800) to its limits. Not sure how the N900's PowerVR compares to that, especially since it's also OpenGL vs GLES, but I can hardly imagine it to be much faster.

That being said, iirc the last attempt of porting Hedgewars to the N900 was before there were serious attempts on getting hardfp support in Fremantle. So a hardfp port should increase performance significantly (still not sure if it would be enough).

btw:
I don't understand why Hedgewars relies on GPU acceleration at all. It doesn't look like it needs to.

I actually looked at hedgewars source, just to see how easily it would port (to SFOS actually, but no matter...)

The darn thing is just crazy, parts of it are written in c, other parts in pascal and some bits in lua!
I do not understand how it hangs together

Pascal!? Somebody actually uses that?

Use the Force, check the Source, Luke!

I think you missed the Haskell stuff.

Well it did come to my mind that the whole shebang has been written as an excercise in how to interface modules using different programming languages/techniques/paradigms.

It was an expression of bewilderment, not a real question. As in, on seeing someone wearing a coat in a 30°C heat, "what, you are wearing a coat"?

I do never play games on my N900 but that game got deleted on wikipedia