Android support

[icefoxen]

Should happen eventually!

[icefoxen]

Reference for how to make it go, maybe: https://github.com/tanis2000/minigame-rust

[icefoxen]

Apparently getting glium to work on Android is not actually that hard: https://twitter.com/ozkriff/status/889014729884172289

[TatriX]

I'm trying to build a 0.3.3 for android, without success yet though.

[icefoxen]

Good luck! Let me know if you get it to work! I will help with anything I can but I really know nothing about Android programming. Trying out the glium fork of 0.3.3 might be worth a go.

[TatriX]

I compiled the code. Sigh. Current error:

thread 'main' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: UnknownError("Application didn\'t initialize properly, did you include SDL_main.h in the file containing your main() function?")', /checkout/src/libcore/result.rs:860:4

[TatriX]

It seems that add_dirs doesn't support android:

FilesystemError("App data directories not supported")

[TatriX]

andybarron/app-dirs-rs#6 (comment)

[icefoxen]

Copied from the above app-dirs-rs issue:

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/data-storage.html seems like the place to start

SDL2's filesystem path code does a sort of similar task so I thought it might be helpful, but doesn't look super hopeful: https://hg.libsdl.org/SDL/file/8df7a59b5528/src/filesystem/android/SDL_sysfilesystem.c  

https://hg.libsdl.org/SDL/file/8df7a59b5528/docs/README-android.md has some useful information under "loading assets".

Looks like Android has some special functionality for static data in addition to normal filesystem paths, so it's not entirely trivial.

Basically, Android has its own thoughts about where data should be stored and supporting that looks like it might take adding another VFS type to src/vfs.rs. Fortunately that shouldn't be TOO hard? If you want to give it a go, try hacking a minimal type in, implementing VFS on it that just returns file-doesn't-exist or something, and shove it rudely into the filesystem context in place of what's normally there. You won't be able to load assets but if everything else works you should be able to at least draw meshes and stuff.

I predict the next error will be sound initialization, since rodio uses cpal which doesn't support Android (yet). :-P That should be fairly easy to disable; we need the option to detect and optionally ignore sound errors in ggez anyway. After that you'll probably need to tell it to init the right version of OpenGL.

Thennnnnnn... maybe it will work?

[TatriX]

I hacked the code, a bit, and managed to bypass filesystem module.
The actual problem now is I need to call SDL_Android_Init(env, cls);.
I hope I could manage this before I go insane.

[icefoxen]

Don't go insane, we need your brain intact! 😁

It does occur to me that this would be easier if ggez had a more modular structure like Love2D does, where you can enable or disable individual modules. Then you could just start with everything disabled, get that working, and turn things on one piece at a time as you make them work. That sort of structure wouldn't be HARD to do but would require extra indirection and error-checking, which is why I didn't do it in the first place. Hmmmm.

[TatriX]

Current state of the art:
sdl2+rust compiles and runs on my arm8 phone.

Currently I'm trying to figure out how can I break decency cycle.