FreedroidRPG

Hello,

I am one of the people working on the latest iterations of FreedroidRPG, an open source isometric Diablo-like RPG (our most recent release version was 0.14.1 last November). We have versions available for Linux and Windows (development tests here), and some people have mentioned that they would like to see this on the Wii.

I have been working on a series of patches to add Gamepad/Joystick support to the game before our next release, but beyond that I don't know what would be needed, and like most of the developers, I don't actually have a Wii, so I can't test things out. I don't think it would be that hard?

I thought that someone here might like to try it out? Maybe?


About the game internals:
For graphics and input we use the Open GL/SDL libraries with most the the engine written in C. Dialogs and events are written in Lua.

About our development process:
We have an IRC chatroom (#freedroid on irc.freenode.net ), mailing list (freedroid-discussion@lists.sourceforge.net), and bug tracker for discussing bugs and features.

Our development code repository: svn co [freedroid.svn.sourceforge.net] freedroid

To get included, we submit patches to the review board, after which they meet the admins' approval, they are uploaded to the Sourceforge repository.

There also is a mostly-separate group working on translations, although we don't currently have them in the game.

I took a quick look in the source, and it doesn't look that hard to port. You don't really need gamepad/joystick support, as you can use the wiimote as mouse cursor.

The hardest parts are video and audio. SDL is ported, but SDL on the Wii does not always acts the same as SDL on the PC. Audio does only 32kHz or 48kHz for example.

To be honest using the wiimote as a mouse kinda sucks when it comes to fine pointer control (it has a habit of jerking when pressing buttons), I'd advise modifying SDL-wii to support using the nunchuk stick to control the mouse pointer.

Quote
Daid
The hardest parts are video and audio. SDL is ported, but SDL on the Wii does not always acts the same as SDL on the PC. Audio does only 32kHz or 48kHz for example.

We don't currently have any pre-rendered videos, so does this mean video shouldn't be a problem?

As for audio, it looks like all of our audio files (in sound/) are .ogg files sampled at 44kHz. Does this mean that we should re-sample at either one of those bit rates? Beyond resampling is there anything else that is needed?

Quote
tueidj
modifying SDL-wii to support using the nunchuk stick to control the mouse pointer

In my main proposed gamepad patch I map the Wii D-pad (joystick hat) to act like a joystick (like my Logitech D-pad).

As for modifying/including SDL-wii, how do I do this? Currently I guess we assume that SDL comes with the system in it's own package, e.g. Ubuntu installation instructions.

For SDL, just assume the libraries are there.
For the audio, you can resample in code, at runtime. I do so in GuitarsOnFire, it's not perfect for sound quality, but it works.
For video, I mean, graphics, everything you draw with OpenGL/SDL might need to be looked at.

I'm not going to port this (no time) but the person that does will need a Wii to test on.

And then there are memory constrains, you only have something around 80MB of memory to work with on the Wii, this includes everything including textures in memory.

Quote
Daid
And then there are memory constrains, you only have something around 80MB of memory to work with on the Wii, this includes everything including textures in memory.

That seems like it would be a major problem. A short playtest indicates we use significantly more memory than that (~250 Mb, perhaps much more with longer games, it jumps up with each new level?). I don't think we could make that much up via code optimization.

So I think that probably answers the question: it is probably not possible to get this running on the Wii without significant cuts. I don't think the development group is really interested in doing that right now, as we are adding textures and other things to flesh out the game a bit more. Oh well.

Thanks for such rapid responses!

You could cut 50% of the texture memory use by using 16bit textures, but low memory usage is something you need to add from the start I guess. I'm also running into problems with The Prophecy, and that's just a platform game, designed for the Wii from the start.