Hello people,

It's been a while since I posted an update and this is mostly because I'm working on the GUI and communication with the hedgewars engine and I can't really say just yet that X or Y has been finished. However here's a little progress update after all.

In the previous post I stated that I would try to finish "Download of game files", "Get an AI vs AI game going" and "Implement interfacing with TouchScreens" I've postponed the last 2 points for now and I've finished the first one.

The first point, download of game files has indeed been finished.
There was an dilemma on how to implement it, on one side we'd like to include it in the .apk (the apk is the file you download to your phone which gets installed). The reason why this was favorable is that we don't have to host anything our self, we can upload it to the Android Market servers and they take care of everything. The .apk file would be around 75mb and you can see that it'll take up a lot of bandwidth if you have to host it yourself. This approach had two big problems: One the Android Market has a limit on the apk size: 50mb, this is too little for our needs and we'd have to split it into two separate apps. Meaning you, the user, would have to download two files from the market. Not ideal obviously. The second issue is that if we did manage to get all the data into one big apk, you, the user would have to download 50mb each time an update occurs, download 50mb worth of data which is on the device already.
Another approach is downloading of a webserver, really the only downside is the bandwidth we're gonna try code.google.com/hedgewars to host it for us they do have a fair-policy limit but I'm guessing that one is pretty high. Using a web server allows us to be more flexible with what you can download, some might like better sound, others are oke with a higher compression etc etc.

The other two points have been postponed because when working on the communication to the engine (starting games with a specific configuration) I found myself creating tiny bits of the UI already in order to test different settings and to prevent doing extra work I figured I might build the UI properly the first time, and I've been busy with that, screenshots will appear shortly ;)

Finally I promised a guide on how to compile the Android port yourself, its coming its coming but because the branch on code.google.com/hedgewars is broken right now I won't post it just yet, however it'll be there Soon(tm)

Xeli