[GSoC 2012] Port SuperTux to the web

[Xingxing Pan]

Hi, everyone.

I'm a GSoC 2012 student. I've build emscripten to have a try and read
everything in the wiki. I'm excited to find so many c/c++ programs can
be compiled to javscript, and they run really well in browsers. That's
amazing. I'm interested to port SuperTux to make emscripten more
fascinating.

After a little glance to SuperTux, I think SDL may be the hardest
part. I explored in this group and find emscripten has implemented a
subset of SDL. I think I can start from this. I'll submit a detailed
proposal after further survey on the project and discussion with you
guys. Any advices and suggestions are welcome.

Currently I'm a third year graduate student in the toolchain team of
Microprocessor R&D Center of Peking University, China. I'm experienced
at porting software and have done some open source projects. I've
ported GDB, GDBStub for SimpleScalar，GCJ, OpenJDK/Zero and Eclipse to
UniCore/Linux. UniCore is 32 bit RSIC machine which has its own
instruction set. I participated in GSoC 2011 last year and worked for
the FreeBSD community. I really hope I could make contributions to the
amazing emscripten project.

Xingxing Pan

[Ehsan Akhgari]

Hi Xingxing,

I was wondering which portion of the SDL implementation you find challenging?

Cheers,
Ehsan

[Xingxing Pan]

Hi, Ehsan.

I mean SDL may be the challenge for me, as I've never dive into
multimedia libraries before. But I'd like to have a try.
It seems SDL is based on OpenGL, and there's map from OpenGL to WebGL.
And you're doing the work right?

On 3月18日, 上午10时37分, Ehsan Akhgari <ehsan.akhg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Xingxing,
>
> I was wondering which portion of the SDL implementation you find
> challenging?
>
> Cheers,
> Ehsan

[Xingxing Pan]

SuperTux can rendered by SDL or OpenGL. So OpenGL is optional. I'm
studying SDL and I'll keep looking.

[Xingxing Pan]

emscripten's implementation for SDL is in src/library_sdl.js. After
following an SDL tutorial and some grep glance, I'm getting a more
clear picture of the translation related to SDL. LLVM intermedia
presentation and emscripten's internals are still mysterious to me.
I'll keep trying.

[Alon Zakai]

Porting SuperTux using Emscripten sounds like a nice
project idea!

Depending on how SuperTux renders, this could be very simple
or less so. If it renders pixels by pixel using an SDL buffer,
that should work now. If it uses SDL Gfx (higher-level 2D
API, I think), then we don't support that yet (but we might
soon, I have seen other games that need it and might do it
myself). If it uses OpenGL, then it would need to be ported
to a subset of OpenGL that maps to WebGL, which I am
not sure how much work would be (but I am hoping not
too much, since there isn't any complex 3D stuff in SuperTux).

So not sure how much rendering work there is. Aside from
that, to do a proper port we might want to customize the
UI, how levels are downloaded, and other stuff. Is there
a level editor? If so, would be great to port that too, and
add a way to share levels online.

Regarding all of this, it's worth talking to the people in
the SuperTux project itself.

Best,
Alon Zakai

[Xingxing Pan]

Hi Alon,

I'll look into it. Thanks.

Cheers,
Xingxing

--

潘星星

北京大学 信息科学技术学院计算机系
微处理器研发中心 理1818
邮编100871

 

Pan Xingxing

MicroProcessor R&D Center(MPRC)
No 1 Science bldg, Rm 1818, Peking University
Haidian, Beijing,100871

P.R.China