Capabilities

Well I thought this section would be okay to ask a few technical details of this engine I really wasn't able to clarify with my google-fu. I was wondering how well ORX handled multitouch on android and ios, and also I was rather curious on whether or not this engine had networking support, I know that could be a booger to handle with all the platforms and to be honest I've only looked at a handful of the source files but I saw no mention of it. Well I'll keep this short and mods feel free to move this thread if its in the wrong place.

Comments

  • edited April 2012
    Haven't played with the Android/iOS stuff myself, so can't comment on the multitouch stuff sorry. (I'm sure someone better able to help with this will be along shortly! :))

    As for network, it isn't included; I've been writing my own currently, thus I know this first hand. :)
  • edited April 2012
    Well Grey your very prompt I must say I just joined like 15 minutes ago and you've already responded to all of my posts so far, but as far as networking goes me and a colleague are going to be using this engine so considering it's open source I'd really like to atleast add a little something to it. I'm fairly decent with C but mainly in the micro-controller department, but if you'd like some support on the networking features I'd probably be a little slow to start but would be more than happy to atleast debug some logic errors.
  • edited April 2012
    Certainly happy to welcome contributions -- The main reason we don't have a networking library in orx currently, is to do with getting a nice generic interface for it. Networking is one of those 'fun' things where (as we don't want to write our OWN networking library) we need the interface both generic in terms of implementation (so people can use whatever external library they want) as well as generic enough to make -using- orxNETWORK_* useful for -whatever- anyone wants to implement with it. BUT, if all we're doing is wrapping our own interface around other libraries, and essentially offering sockets... why even offer it at all? :D

    edit: plus... you know... time consuming to implement and Iarwain is basically our main 'feature' implementer type dude right now :D
  • edited April 2012
    Good point, I wasn't sure but pretty much assumed just tacking on an external library was already considered, I'll have to think on it and get back to ya on that one.
  • edited April 2012
    Hi and welcome !

    So, just quickly (because I'm at work), there's multitouch support for android and Ios (but, I'm not really sure for android native).

    Both Ios and Android use the same interface now for that, so your code will be cross plateform (I haven't test the Ios part actually, so I can't say "yes it works exactly in the same way", but if there's no problem, it should be ok).

    I will explain you how to integrate multitouch later, when you will need it (maybe there's a thread about that on the forum, but not sure that the thread is up to date).

    Hope that helps !
  • edited April 2012
    Hi beachbum,

    Grey and faistoiplaisir have pretty much covered everything so I'll only add a couple of details. :)

    The multitouch event interface is common to iOS/Android however the pressure info will always be 0/1 on iOS as it's not something that exists on those devices but we wanted to keep a minimum of "compatibility" here.

    As for networking, simply wrapping an external library wouldn't add much to the engine, beside some convenience maybe? I'd love to see networking support in orx, but that'd mean having a deeper integration such as high level features (messages with priorities, TTL, object replication, automated synchronization, dead reckoning, etc...).
    Unfortunately the scope gets very big very fast and I don't have much free time to add all this myself but would be very happy to see someone contributing with something similar.

    I also thought a bit of lockstep networking modes that are great for small number of players, however I'm not sure orx (and mostly all its dependencies) would be 100% deterministic.
    Not even mentioning all the pitfalls coming with the support of so many different compilers and hardware platforms (FPUs are the most fun when it comes to determinism...) making such an approach virtually impossible. :)
  • edited April 2012
    Yeah I figured networking would be more of a pain than its worth, considering all that it has to handle and support, not that I really need it, just figured since this beautiful engine was completely open id offer, but also thanks iarwain and faistoiplaisir for the multitouch help that will be greatly appreciated :cheer: .
  • edited April 2012
    beachbum, here's a useful thread where I asked about multitouch before: https://forum.orx-project.org/discussion/2488#Comment_2850
  • edited April 2012
    Hey alright thx acksys , looks like I'll be needing that fairly soon.
  • edited April 2012
    Hi,

    Just to avoid mistake and a waste of time, here in attachement is the last Multitouch wrapper I use in my current game.

    I'm not sure, but I think that the payload has changed since the post mentionned by acksys, so my multitouch wrapper is not up to date.

    Use this one instead.

    Now, you have all needed information to integrate multitouch in your apps ;)

    Cheers ! https://forum.orx-project.org/uploads/legacy/fbfiles/files/MultiTouch-b79e48784d4bcefdb49c775ceca83344.zip
  • edited April 2012
    My god this forum is amazing, I was just about to get cooking on a demo for mobile, now I have the ingredients, with like no work whatsoever thx a bunch faistoiplaisir :laugh: .
  • edited April 2012
    No problem & you're welcome ;)

    Everybody here seems to love orx, and we are all trying to do our best to make orx and orx's support better ^^
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