Farmville type plugin

[lionfury]

It would be cool to have a farmville/we rule type plugin (build a farm or a kingdom)

[gbl08ma]

The closest Rockbox has to what you said is Super Domination (listed in the games menu as "superdom").

[lionfury]

First that's nowhere near close to what im talking about and second I'm suggesting a farmville type plugin not asking if there is one.

[gbl08ma]

Then, I don't think it's possible to have Farmville on Rockbox in the real sense of the work, that is, a flash-based game for Facebook.
What can be done, is something menu-based and text-based, at most with some bitmaps - no fancy animations, etc.

But don't expect anyone to code it for you. If you code it and submit a patch, it will be welcome (but I don't play Farmville)

[froggyman]

You might have some luck finding a gameboy (color) game that is similar to that and running it through the GB(C) emulator, rockboy.

[Chronon]

Then, I don't think it's possible to have Farmville on Rockbox in the real sense of the work, that is, a flash-based game for Facebook.
What can be done, is something menu-based and text-based, at most with some bitmaps - no fancy animations, etc.

But don't expect anyone to code it for you. If you code it and submit a patch, it will be welcome (but I don't play Farmville)

Doom can be played, so I don't see anything that excludes fancy animations.  (The amount of work may be prohibitive, however, unless you can find a suitable project to port.)

[gbl08ma]

Then, I don't think it's possible to have Farmville on Rockbox in the real sense of the work, that is, a flash-based game for Facebook.
What can be done, is something menu-based and text-based, at most with some bitmaps - no fancy animations, etc.

But don't expect anyone to code it for you. If you code it and submit a patch, it will be welcome (but I don't play Farmville)

Doom can be played, so I don't see anything that excludes fancy animations.  (The amount of work may be prohibitive, however, unless you can find a suitable project to port.)

Absolutely correct. But, it's not something done easy - like you said, "the amount of work may be prohibitive".
About porting, I'm also curious if someone has already done a GPL'ed clone of Farmville...

[torne]

Farmville is pretty fundamentally a multiplayer game, also...

[gbl08ma]

Farmville is pretty fundamentally a multiplayer game, also...

Also it would be difficult to play on DAPs with smaller screens. That's why I said that it would be a menu-based game.
I'm curious to know how timing would be implemented... as far as I know, Farmville is a timing-based game, that is, you do "Y" thing then wait "X" hours to be able to do "Z" thing. As far as I know, on Rockbox this would require having a background thread, or else having the plugin running 24/7.

But if someone comes with a patch with some work done, well, it will have my entire appreciation, at least for the effort!

[Chronon]

Farmville is pretty fundamentally a multiplayer game, also...

Ah.  I don't know anything about it.


Edit: Not quite building a kingdom but SimCity's source is available as Micropolis.  It is GPL and written in C and doesn't appear to use any floats or doubles, but it does use malloc.

[gevaerts]

Edit: Not quite building a kingdom but SimCity's source is available as Micropolis.  It is GPL and written in C and doesn't appear to use any floats or doubles, but it does use malloc.

It's GPL indeed, but it's GPLv3 or later. Currently rockbox is GPLv2 or later. At previous DevCons, the consensus as I understood it was that we'd prefer to keep that "2" in there. There are various ways in which this might be resolved, such as having the sources under various licenses (as long as they're somehow compatible), or (possibly) somehow having the plugin interface also be a "license boundary" (although I suspect there are several details in both the GPL and the way our code is structured that make this tricky)

Micropolis seems to be moving to C++ and Python, but we don't really have to care about that.

Another option might be lincity, which seems to be pure C, but it does use some floating point (I haven't looked at details), and while it is GPL, I'm not sure if it's GPLv2 or "GPLv2 or later". Pure GPLv2 would be annoying for basically the same reason that GPLv3 (or later) is annoying.

There's also lincity-ng, which started out as a port of linicty, byt they have moved to c++ as well. They are GPLv2 or later though, which seems to point to lincity also maybe having the "or later" part.

_{Edit: I did find the old C micropolis now, so I removed the bit stating that I couldn't find it.}

[funman]

Virality only affects binaries being redistributed.

Using GPLv3 code won't affect our GPLv2+ source code.

Reference: GNU website

[gevaerts]

Virality only affects binaries being redistributed.

Using GPLv3 code won't affect our GPLv2+ source code.

Reference: GNU website

That's certainly true. I think it's still something we need to reach a consensus for first though.

There's also the (probably relatively minor) issue that we still have a few GPLv2 only files, such as usb_ch9.h (which claims to be v2+ because those headers were bulk-added). That particular file is definitely a minor issue and can be recreated if needed (it only contains defines and structures that are directly derived from the USB spec). I'm personally not aware of other such files.

[funman]

Basically I just want to point that GPLv3 shouldn't prevent someone from considering to work on new code (being it a plugin or something else).

If / when such a thing happens then we'll have a reason to talk about redistributing our binaries as GPLv3 and look precisely for incompatibilities (like the GPLv2 only code you mention).

For now GPLv3 isn't as popular as GPLv2+ (except in GNU software of course) but it's becoming more common, so we'll likely cross more GPLv3 software in the future ;-)

[redblade8]

If farmville uses flash to make it work on a computer , why not make a plugin that allows you to play flash content? The archos 5 allows flash games to be played. It is also a touch screen...so on non -touch screen targets I guess mouse emulation would be a possibility. I am not sure that any of this would work though...