Vega Strike Forums

Hi all,

Has anyone ever considered making a handheld version of vega strike?
E.g. iphone or android? Would you consider it feasible?

Considering how much would have to be changed to get the controls to work on a phone.. unlikely. Getting it to run on a console would be simpler though still nearly impossible as there are not enough coders to even attempt it.

It would be nice to see VS on any of the 3 consoles, but to do so would also require buying in to the related technology as each console has specialized hardware you would be required to purchase to develop on the machines (from what I hear). The only one you wouldn't have to would be under XBox Live since you could use gamestudio and xna to make it happen, but that in itself would require recoding a lot of the base code to handle a lot of the win32 calls.

I've actually pondered on that, thinking what could be extracted from VS (the game) and made playable on a handheld, most specifically, android device.

It would indeed need recoding of mostly everything. But since python has already been ported to android (in fact it builds fine with android's NDK with minimal issues), almost all the base interface and scripting would work with minimal if any changes.

Most of VS should build under android's NDK, at least all that isn't OpenGL-related. Since VS doesn't have a clear separation and OpenGL is used all over the place, creating an android frontend could be a challenge. And since VS is very memory-intensive, it would need a lot of love to make it workable.

Still, if privateer could run on a 100Mhz 486 DX4 with 4MB of RAM, VS probably can be made to run on an 800Mhz ARM with 128MB don't you think?

Anyway, true, it would take a lot of man hours. But it's a project I've been giving some thought nonetheless.

Meh. The inherent risk is that we might just end up with yet another half-finished project lying around.

Yes, thats a valid point. At least if it is started we have a large amount of code that can be tweaked already. The down side to a phone app is the lack of artists.. even to complete art for the here and now.

For the moment going on about an adroid vs edition is all talk. We still need more artists for the current vs game (and its twin ogres) before we can really do more than planning on an android

There is so much to be done which could so radically improve the standard VS engine and game running on desktops and laptops, that it would be sad to see resources get rerouted to a hand held port, before something like v1.5.

But it could also spun the development of android-targetted mods

Yeah but our four (still) existing mods seem to be struggling with a lot of basic engine issues like the black box unit AI. Or black box code in general.

Or more game play features and mechanics that motivate the player to want to do more than turn on a series of autopilots.

4? what 4 mods are those?? I can only think of 2 really that get any work: VegaTrek and Privateer PU. Privateer GG and Pi Armada are both dormant (armada only recently had any activity). Hell, the people at the GG forum are complaining the project admin hasnt even logged in in almost or over a year.

I was counting VS proper (that is vega strike the game) as a mod too.

All I know about GG is that they put out a release about a year ago, which is more recently than VS. So I figured they had to be still kicking, though if they have had major troubles since then, well maybe we are down to three mods (including VS).

Chances are our mod community is small because the engine isn't easy and powerful enough to use, not because a version for portables is currently nonexistent. We should really make what we have top notch, and then if there is demand someone else might even do such a port independently. In other words we should:
Or for you C++ folks:

The GG release from a year or two ago was based on .5 and not a more recent svn copy.

But it is still project activity I mean- a sign of life. Also they might have a policy of only updating to the most current stable release, to avoid bugs.

True, though GG 1.03 using .5 was also released about a year and a half AFTER .5 came out (which doesn't mean much since PU still uses .4.3 i think)

Anyway.. its all moot.

Its nice to know that there is some interest in porting VS over to android even if it IS a pipe dream for the momment.

GG is alive and kicking. Slowly kicking, but alive nonetheless.

Thing is, GG pushes forward with a very restrictive lemma: "to faithfully recreate the original". So, at some point, GG will be done. And I believe it's close to that, that's why it hasn't pushed many releases over time.

In any case, I've been coordinating with John about a couple of things GG wanted to do (one of which is update the engine to a more recent SVN snapshot). If all that isn't showing in their forums, must be that John is a bit overly secretive sometimes.

Well, if he keeps being secretive for too long hes going to have a revolt on his hands. Theres a lot of talk on the GG forums about the project being abandoned and its making the fans feel rather irked that theres no help about problems with the code etc etc. Can you check and see if hes still going to work on it and tell him to stop by to at least say hes alive would make the people over there feel better

well there is a forum about a handheld ogre version in the ogre forums. but i don't know wether we could use the cegui with it.

I think it's iOS only, rather than handheld at larget.

iOS is no good for VS, since VS is GPL and Apple won't allow GPL software for their platform.