The beginning of the adventure
The goal of the project is to port the game to web browsers so that people can enjoy it without installing and it runs on all platforms with a modern browser. Furthermore, web is the future and there will be more and more games that are web compatible. I'm proud that I can be one of the pioneers to try some new things and know how to get it to work.
Since the technology is not mature enough, there are a lot of problems that I can or cannot foresee. The project is not to "hardcode" the game using javascript but rather find a clever way to convert the game engine automatically, which facilitates update and generally is aimed to develop a workflow or framework to automate the conversion process. Pascal and javascript are two different languages; native and web are two different platforms; these differences in terms of language specification and API compatibilities makes the conversion challenging and is basically the problem my project is going to solve.
My proposal divides the project into three phases:
(1) Port run-time library functions that pascal uses into C, which can be converted into javascript using empscripten.
(2) Port SDL functions into C or javascript if needed.
(3) Port the OpenGL code into Web GL.
Phase 1 and phase 2 are pretty much project independent, i.e. I don't need to depend on others' work much. However, I still need to dig into existing tools like empscripten and pas2c to see how smart they are. Phase 3 depends on the optimized rendering system since WolfgangSt is going to rewrite it to make it ES 2.0 compatible, and without the migration, I cannot do the conversion either. Finally I will integrate all things together. If everything works neatly, then it is time to write a web front-end and invite people to play it!
I feel very lucky since I have an awesome mentor nemo who always gives me great help and inspires me a lot. Here I'd like to give my sincere thanks to him and all mentors in advance. And good luck to all participants!
- xymeng's blog
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hbc
wow! great job!
Cairo
Good luck with that! I can see it being very helpful for lots of people!
Medo42
This sounds like quite an undertaking. Props for taking on a project with so many unknowns, I'm looking forward to following your progress.
iiiGerardoiii
woow that's a big step, keep it up guys and good luck!!
Dark Spyro
WOW, good work and good luck!!