Morrowind on Android

[philjord]

If anyone is interested there is a single developer working on a port of Morrowind to Android.
The demo video is here

YouTube Link
It's about half way done and is working very well on a mobile now.

[MetaCthulhu]

As the first guy to finish Morrowind on the Raspberry Pi, I feel compelled to say that the last I checked Bethesda didn't want Morrowind being a poster child for an engine that runs on Android.[1]

[Crawldragon]

I would be very interested in how they intend to design the control scheme for this. I suppose if you're enough of an Android nut to want to play Morrowind on a phone you probably have one of those little controller things already but Morrowind on a four-inch touchpad would be quite a challenge.

[Tingz0r]

Clearly if they can't make money off of it, they're not going to let you pursue it.

[philjord]

Hi guys,
I'm that single developer I oddly referred to in the third person in my post.

MetaCthulhu,
Are you SandStranger? If so I'd love to chat more about your experiances.
Yes I've seen those emails, Matt is clear that it can be cross platform, but can't be focused only on the phone. My engine is pure Java so it is as cross platform as you can ever get.

Crawldragon,
Yes the interface is not simple to design, you can see in the video I have a simple 4 corner approach now, which makes things complex if you want to pick up a loaf of bread during combat, but I think I can get it sorted out. The inventory and spell management will not be able to be like the original.

TingzOr,
If 500k people pledge to my kickstarter then Bethesda might be interested, but I doubt I'm going to get enough backers to make them care.

[MetaCthulhu]

MetaCthulhu,
Are you SandStranger? If so I'd love to chat more about your experiances.
Yes I've seen those emails, Matt is clear that it can be cross platform, but can't be focused only on the phone. My engine is pure Java so it is as cross platform as you can ever get.

I am not, however there is a thread on the OpenMW forums about your project. I suggest posting there and seeing if you can get in touch with them. They've been working on a similar project for years now, so they should have a ton of advice and insight that you won't be able to get anywhere else.

psi29a is a nice guy, he held my hand through my first months of Linux, and is the guy who originally talked with Matt Grandstaff about the legal situation, so if you can get in touch with him he should be able to give you some guidance on this whole thing.

[philjord]

MetaCthulhu,
Thanks for that info, good of you to take the time.

I've got a post of reddit that's linked to the OpenMW one, though apparently I'm not allowed to post it
/r/Morrowind/comments/4zbhu3/morrowind_on_android_yes_again/


I don't feel I should take up space on the OpenMW forums, I want to stay as separate as possible, there's obviously a lot of people confusing me as being part of OpenMW now, as you can imagine.

To be honest if I get enough traffic to my project to actually interest Bethesda, I'll be happy with whatever Matt tells me to do, though I'd like a more detailed description about the issues than psi29a got, it felt a bit vague and non committal.
I've always wondered if it's a licensing issue with one of their third party tools, or Gamebryo or something.

[Crawldragon]

From my own limited experience (I am not a lawyer and am not providing legal advice) game industry folk usually don't mind you reverse-engineering their engine so long as you don't violate any patents (which can be quite difficult) or use any of their game assets or copyrights in the finished product. I'm not aware of Bethesda's official stance on this beyond what was said in the linked e-mail, though. A good example of this is the open-source versions of Doom, which stipulate that you can use your compiled source for whatever as long as you don't use their assets. John Carmack is a bro that way

[Tingz0r]

Don't forget that Bethesda once sued over the use of the word "Scrolls."

[Crawldragon]

Yeah, but they're also tolerating DaggerXL. Then again, Daggerfall is publicly available freeware now, so the issue might not exist in that particular case. It's shaky. Like I said, I'm not a lawyer and I'm not giving legal advice.

[legoless]

Yeah, but they're also tolerating DaggerXL. Then again, Daggerfall is publicly available freeware now, so the issue might not exist in that particular case.

They renamed that project to "XL Engine" a good few years back.

[MetaCthulhu]

From my own limited experience (I am not a lawyer and am not providing legal advice) game industry folk usually don't mind you reverse-engineering their engine so long as you don't violate any patents (which can be quite difficult) or use any of their game assets or copyrights in the finished product.

IANYL, but it's not so much as "they don't mind" as "they can't do anything". As long as you black-box reverse-engineer the engine, and don't use their assets, trademarks, or copyrighted material, they can't touch you.

(I also want to note black-box reverse-engineering is as cool as it sounds)

[philjord]

I've never heard of black box reverse engineering before, but I see the interwebs no the term.
I thought reverse engineering always referred to examination and disassembly, though only illegal if you then make a copy of it from that information.
Whereas what I'm doing (and OpenMW, etc) is just called "doing the same thing they did"

[GamerAim]

Yeah, but they're also tolerating DaggerXL. Then again, Daggerfall is publicly available freeware now, so the issue might not exist in that particular case.

They renamed that project to "XL Engine" a good few years back.

As I recall, DaggerXL merged with a similar project, though it's possible that DaggerXL changed its name beforehand.

[MetaCthulhu]

I've never heard of black box reverse engineering before, but I see the interwebs no the term.
I thought reverse engineering always referred to examination and disassembly, though only illegal if you then make a copy of it from that information.
Whereas what I'm doing (and OpenMW, etc) is just called "doing the same thing they did"

Black-box reverse-engineering is just a term I use to make clear that all the code is recreated and not taken from the original source.

Hidden:

Input being the button the user hits, the blackbox being Bethesda's proprietary code, and the output is what the character does.

Both you (and OpenMW, and XL Engine, and many other projects) rewrite the code based on the input/output, without looking at the original source. This is different from a professional porter, who has to reverse engineer the game to work on a different OS, but has access to the source code. Both are forms of reverse engineering, but "black-box reverse-engineer" makes it very clear the original source was unviewed and uncopied, and thus infringement is impossible.

Can I also ask: Why Java? I'm not a programmer, and I was wondering if there was any reason you chose Java in particular?

[legoless]

Can I also ask: Why Java? I'm not a programmer, and I was wondering if there was any reason you chose Java in particular?

Java is the default programming language for Android SDKs, i.e. it's used for programming applications.

[philjord]

I wrote it in Java because I love Java as a language basically.
This was back before MS killed Java on the client. In fact Java was on course to become a good client side language, they were extremely close to having it on the first Xbox on release day.

So I stuck with it, and it was lucky that Google went with an open language for their phones.

Also I hate the fact that half my brain power goes into parsing syntax when working on c++ code.