Bit Blot Forum
Aquaria => General => Topic started by: Alec on June 30, 2010, 10:18:59 am
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Interesting: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/06/Aquaria-on-the-PSP
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Looks promising.
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Maybe eventually someone will port Aquaria to one of the iThings and you can tilt to swim. ^^
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Cool, seems like it would be a pain to work on. Good for him
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Wow. I hope this works!
The PSP homebrew port of Cave Story worked out great. If he can get Aquaria to work well enough, the PSP might have a new best game!
I'm not savvy enough to reprocess the assets and compile it like he says is necessary, though. Maybe he'll put together a program to do that for us? I'll be watching this develop very closely!
Also, Slashdot story (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/07/03/0212255).
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Definitely been on top of this when he first posted the information that he was working on it even before the source was released. :)
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Definitely been on top of this when he first posted the information that he was working on it even before the source was released. :)
Wonder how he managed that...
Edit: Whoa, is it really Danger Mouse? I haven't seen you around since way back last year!
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Yup, I'm back. Don't know how I've managed to find the time, but here I am. Specially since we're just starting RIMPAC 2010 out here in the Hawaiian chain. The perks of the Navy life I suppose. Good to see the community going strong, and even better to see the success that has come Alec's way through all this hard effort on such a wonderful game.
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Welcome back! Good to see you again. :)
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That does look cool. And that one link wasted me a good couple of hours as I delved further and further into pandora territory. Bah!
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I'm not savvy enough to reprocess the assets and compile it like he says is necessary, though. Maybe he'll put together a program to do that for us?
Ask and you shall receive (http://achurch.org/AquariaPSPBuilder-1.1.315.tar.gz). (But only for Linux, I'm afraid; I don't have a functional Windows build environment at the moment.)
(URL edited 7/18 to reflect updated build. There's an always-up-to-date link on my home page (http://achurch.org/index-e.html).)
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I'm not savvy enough to reprocess the assets and compile it like he says is necessary, though. Maybe he'll put together a program to do that for us?
Ask and you shall receive (http://achurch.org/AquariaPSPBuilder-1.1.315.tar.gz). (But only for Linux, I'm afraid; I don't have a functional Windows build environment at the moment.)
(URL edited 7/18 to reflect updated build. There's an always-up-to-date link on my home page (http://achurch.org/index-e.html).)
Dude! Awesome! Thanks! You rock!
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Happy to serve. (: I'm still working on the port, so you may want to check back for updates every once in a while -- that said, there probably won't be any eye-opening improvements without an engine rewrite. (Nothing against Alec, of course; it's just that the PSP's hardware is too limited to run programs designed for the PC smoothly. Too bad they don't sell the Droid in Japan...)
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I wonder what kind of engine changes would be required... it might be kinda fun to work on cleaning that stuff up. :)
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Well, after a bit of an adventure downloading and installing Ubuntu, I was able to run the builder program. It worked great, and didn't take too long even in a VM. I especially liked the little counter-spoiler option that hides filenames, that was a nice touch.
As for the port itself, it looks fantastic! When I first started it up, it seemed to run even better than my macbook. It wasn't until the dream sequence with all those enemies that the frame rate dropped enough for me to notice it. I got to Naija's home ok, and in there it runs like a dream. It crashed and shut itself off when I tried to reenter home waters, but when I relaunched it it worked ok, so no reproducing that bug, sorry. Home waters is a bit choppy just because it's so well populated, but despite that it's just as awesome as when I first played Aquaria. I can't believe that my PSP can do this, it's just amazing.
An engine rewrite sounds like a lot of work, but I'll be first in line to try it out if it happens! Maybe it can be integrated into the PC versions, too... my first-gen macbook plays the game well for the most part, but it still slows down in some parts. Maybe that would enable ports to other platforms as well, like the Wii or Android or the iPhone.
In any case, thanks a ton, achurch! This is so cool.
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I don't want to either get anyone's hopes up, or make Alec feel bad because I'm messing with his engine so much (: but I'm actually working on that rewrite now. My intent is to put together a system interface layer and rewrite BBGE on top of that; if all goes according to plan, the Aquaria code should then be platform-independent, and an Android or Wii or what-have-you port should be as simple as adding a new port directory to the system interface layer. (Well, plus hardware-specific input rules and stuff, but you get the idea.)
If I feel really ambitious, I may try messing with the map data so it can use 3D vertex coordinates and shaders -- I suspect the current 2D setup is a large part of why it runs slow on both the PSP and low-end PCs. My old engine was capable of handling 3D environments with upwards of 80k vertices at 60fps on the PSP, so there's still plenty of potential there. That's still a ways off, though, plus I don't know whether it can be done without needing to include modified map files (which is of course out of bounds).
It crashed and shut itself off when I tried to reenter home waters, but when I relaunched it it worked ok, so no reproducing that bug, sorry.
I had that happen once as well (but only once) -- I suspect it's memory fragmentation, but I haven't been able to track it down. For the time being, I guess just remember to save early and often.
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That sounds cool to me, if you want any help let me know. :)
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Wow, I really hope you can make this work :)
Maybe it's a stupid question, but I can't figure out where to download the EBOOT, is it available at the moment?
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Wow, I really hope you can make this work :)
Maybe it's a stupid question, but I can't figure out where to download the EBOOT, is it available at the moment?
See, the EBOOT file contains all the Aquaria assets (music, art, etc.) that are NOT free. That's why there's not a direct download link. You need to have the linux version of Aquaria installed (the one from the Humble Bundle works), then run achurch's builder and direct it to the aquaria directory. It will take maybe half an hour to process all the files, and it will spit out a working EBOOT for you.
There might be a way to get the builder running under OS X using x11, I'm not sure. I doubt it will work in windows. :p
If you don't have linux, you can download a copy of virtualbox and an Ubuntu iso, both are free software and VB will work on practically any host OS.
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You need to have the linux version of Aquaria installed (the one from the Humble Bundle works), then run achurch's builder and direct it to the aquaria directory. It will take maybe half an hour to process all the files, and it will spit out a working EBOOT for you.
Just a quick clarification -- you can use the data from the Windows version of Aquaria, as long as you make sure Linux can see the Aquaria install directory (the one with the "data" and "gfx" and all those folders inside it). But yeah, that's why there's no direct download link: the PSP needs special preprocessed versions of the game data to run properly, and naturally I can't distribute those.
Alec -- thanks for the OK! (: I'll let you know if I have any questions.
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Oh I see, I was thinking about this totally the wrong way, it would be more convenient for me if there was a windows compiler, but I do have a Ubuntu partition collecting dust, I'll try it out tomorrow.
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Yeah, sorry about the lack of a Windows version -- my Windows build environment is borked at the moment.
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Hi- I've been having problems compiling this and I wonder if anyone's had any success with recent builds or has a recent eboot that I can apply the graphics tool? It seems to be failing on texture.c. PNG issues but I honestly don't know where to begin.
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For the PNG issues, are you referring to the program itself or the PSP builder tool? With respect to the latter, there were some issues in recent builds due to Ubuntu having only old versions of the PNG library, but the current build (1.6.647) (http://achurch.org/AquariaPSPBuilder-1.6.647.tar.gz) should work again. (If it doesn't, let me know and I'll take another look.) If you're building, you may need to install libpng 1.4 yourself by downloading the source from the libpng homepage (http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html).
As for the Aquaria source itself, you'll need to have a cross-compiled version of libpng (and libz) already installed on your system. If I have a chance I'll look into importing the libpng and libz libraries into the source tree, but for the time being I'm afraid you'll need to work it out yourself. Sorry! (I do have a build script for Gentoo, referenced in the README file, but Gentoo is admittedly not the most user-friendly Linux distribution around.)