vassal for android?

General Discussion
5

that’s great, thanks!

hey the product develoment where i work is terrible and always behind, and delivering terrible results on top of it. and those guys are full time paid employees! so i’m just very impressed there is a system like this people are developing and maintaining because they enjoy it…

thanks again,
mike

6

This sounds excellent! It makes the decision between the Nexus 7 and the forthcoming Nexus 10 an obvious one. What, if anything, can be done to support the developers?

7

Thus spake vox:

This sounds excellent! It makes the decision between the Nexus 7 and
the forthcoming Nexus 10 an obvious one. What, if anything, can be done
to support the developers?

It’s hard to develop for hardware you don’t have access to. Someone
needs to have a tablet so we can test things.

–
J.

8

If you are still in need of testers I have a nexus 7 and am more than willing to test.

9

Heya Folks,

This is awesome news, I currently use THDs Splashtop and Teamviewer to play Vassal games on my tablet. Having it’s own app would be amazing!

I too am more than happy to test any builds. I have an Asus Transformer Prime (TF201) running Jelly Bean 4.1.1

C.

10

I would also offer up my TF300 as a tester if you still needed more testers.

11

Thus spake teila:

I would also offer up my TF300 as a tester if you still needed more
testers.

I’m happy to hear that we’ll have people willing to test builds of
VASSAL 4 on tablets.

Our probelm is not a lack of testers, however. So far as I know, none of
the developers has a tablet. It’s extremely hard to develop for a
platform to which you don’t have immediate access, as that means you
can’t even check whether the binaries you’re building run, let alone run
properly. I imagine that I’ll look into building binaries for Android
early in 2013, at which point I’ll need at least one tablet to test
against. If someone has a tablet they’d like to dontate, that would be
most welcome.

–
J.

12

Hi there,

I’m new to VASSAL but love and have played a number of the games VASSAL supports, and I’m also a Java desktop/Android developer, and I have an N7 and a couple of G2’s at my disposal.

If it’s of value, I wouldn’t mind pulling your latest source tree and poke around.

13

Thus spake mkitchin:

Hi there,

I’m new to VASSAL but love and have played a number of the games VASSAL
supports, and I’m also a Java desktop/Android developer, and I have an
N7 and a couple of G2’s at my disposal.

If it’s of value, I wouldn’t mind pulling your latest source tree and
poke around.

The V4 demo repo is here:

git://vassalengine.git.sourceforge.net/ … ssal4-demo

Please don’t interpret this code as anything other than a prototype
in progress. There are lots of things which are problematic about it
which I would not accept in a project which was not a demo.

If you’re willing, it would be useful, first of all, to know what we
need to do to build for Android, preferably with a Linux-hosted cross-
compiler.

–
J.

14

No worries – I develop on Linux (these days) almost exclusively – Fedora 17, Java 7/64-bit. I’ll pull it down today and see what I can see.

15

mkitchen,

you posted way back in 2012 :slight_smile: that you are familiar with “android” and are willing to get an engine running for to get vassal on a tablet (so to say)…

Now we are down about 20% of the new year and I would like to ask, if there is something to report from your side. Never ever heard anymore news about the topic… :frowning:

I wanted to buy a tablet, but realized that the Vassal-engine is NOT running (any more) on the android system. So I started to look for alternitives. BUT the idea of having my beloved vassal on a tablet would be such an overhelming thing that I would stop searching for alternatives and would instead wait for your result!! 8)

Andy

16

Is an android tablet still needed? I have a Kocaso M1050 10" I’d donate to the cause. It’s no Nexus 10, but it runs 4.0.

17

Thus spake CaptSwayworn:

Is an android tablet still needed? I have a Kocaso M1050 10" I’d donate
to the cause. It’s no Nexus 10, but it runs 4.0.

Yes, I’d find it very helpful to have a tablet, both for testing builds
and for seeing what affordances it has.

From where would you be shipping?

–
J.

18

actually, i’ve just realized, i bought a windows 8 netbook a couple of months ago.

seperately, i hate windows 8, and does anyone have any thoughts on how to make it more user friendly for a casual netbook user, or would they recommend installing ubuntu and forgetting about windows all together?

but back to vassal and my netbook, how is vassal looking for windows 8?

thanks,
mike

19

Thus spake skullcleaver:

but back to vassal and my netbook, how is vassal looking for windows 8?

Have you tried it? It should work.

–
J.

20

Hey uckelman!

I just tapped into this thread today, and I am excited to see that android is within the interest of the vassal developers. I would also like to contribute what I can, what needs to be done yet?

cheers

21

This is a MUST…With todays Tech…I would love to see this come up in the near future. Imagine…Playing on a nice medium size tablet instead of lugging around a heavy Laptop?? :smiley:

22

Thus spake “awmiller.andros”:

I just tapped into this thread today, and I am excited to see that
android is within the interest of the vassal developers. I would also
like to contribute what I can, what needs to be done yet?

One thing which would be helpful is if someone would find out about
compilers targeting Android—in particular, if there is a Linux-hosted
gcc cross-compiler.

–
J.

23

The Android SDK is cross-platform and runs on Linux:

developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

Now, Android doesn’t run a standard JVM and the system APIs are different,
so I don’t think you can just cross-compile.
For a quick summary look at

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison … ndroid_API

In particular, Swing is not supported. So getting the current Vassal on
Android would require some work.

As for Vassal 4, moving away from Java would make things a bit trickier,
but not impossible:
developer.android.com/tools/sdk/ndk/index.html

programmers.stackexchange.com/qu … ng-c-and-c

On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 5:38 AM, Joel Uckelman uckelman@nomic.net wrote:

Thus spake “awmiller.andros”:

I just tapped into this thread today, and I am excited to see that
android is within the interest of the vassal developers. I would also
like to contribute what I can, what needs to be done yet?

One thing which would be helpful is if someone would find out about
compilers targeting Android—in particular, if there is a Linux-hosted
gcc cross-compiler.

–
J.

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24

There are a few ways to get Vassal on an android tablet… sortof:

  • CHEAT: run a remote desktop client to connect to your OSX, Windows or Linux machine. The RDP proctocol for windows or Nomachine’s NX for OSX or Linux give the best performance, VNC works but is a bit slow for graphically intense programs like Vassal. There are RDP and NX clients for Android. For IPad/IOS there is no NX client yet, but it’s coming in December 2013.
    The nice thing with this is that you can sit on the couch or on the table playing Vassal with skype or google hangout in the background - and you can switch to your desktop when needed.

  • JAILBREAK: Install Linux on your Android tablet , so you can run the required JRE to run Vassal. As the memory usage of Vassal and the JVM are high you have to have a tablet with lots of memory (> 512)
    kali.org/how-to/kali-linux-a … ux-deploy/
    Conceivably it might be possible to run Vassal on a jailbroken Windows RT tablet with IKVM.net - but as this is a different Java VM it might have a lot of bugs. The same goes for installing Java on a jailbroken iPad. I’ve not tried it.

  • USE WINTEL TABLETS: While the Surface Pro is expensive and the new Haswell powered tablets as well, there wil be cheaper Bay Trail powered windows8 tablets which can run Vassal natively. If you don’t like windows you can put Ubuntu linux on it.

  • PORT Vassal to Android, rewrite everything for the Dalvik JVM (a subset of Java) and when this is complete use a transcompiler like J2ObjC or XMLVM, to convert Java code to Objective-C/C++ for iOS. By the time this is done however (2014-2020) a Tizen, Jolla/Sailfish or Ubuntu mobile OS might have taken over marketshare from Android - and a port to these systems might be easier.

  • MORE MONEY: The bottleneck with these methods is the same as with iPad board game development - depending on your favorite Vassal boardgame playing a boardgame on a < 10 inch touchscreen area can be tedious. The best way is to use the large screen 18" tablets like the HP Envy 20 TouchSmart or Dell XPS 18 Touch which are running native Windows8 anyway. I am not sure if they are to comfortable to use on the couch or in the bathtub, they same a bit heavy to hold.