sgtpuzzles

Android port of Simon Tatham's Puzzles

Code Quality Rank: L1

Programming language: C

License: GNU General Public License v3.0 or later

Tags: App    

README

Android port of Simon Tatham's Puzzles

This is Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection, ported to Android.

The easiest way to install it is from Google Play.

If you'd like to get involved, read on:

How to help without writing any code

Good bug reports and well-thought-out feature suggestions are always helpful, here's the issue tracker. It's always worth a quick search to see if your bug/idea has already been reported.

Simon has an excellent page on how to write a good bug report.

Need to add/change some graphics? The sources live in app/src/main/graphics-sources and were converted to icons with Android Asset Studio

Coders should read on...

Prerequisites

Some knowledge of Android Development and/or C, and ideally JNI, depending on what you want to work on: the puzzles themselves are in C, most Android-specific code is in Java, and JNI (Java Native Interface) is the API bridge between the two.

If you have the option, a Linux-based development machine, as I haven't tried to build on Windows or OSX, and it will need some tweaks.

Android Studio

Android NDK (Native Development Kit)

If using gradle directly, create local.properties with sdk.dir=/your_path_here (I think Android Studio writes this automatically)

I probably missed a few things here. File a bug when you find them. :-)

Getting/configuring the source

The source lives at https://github.com/chrisboyle/sgtpuzzles - you can either clone/download it from there, or make your own fork on github (the Fork button near the top right). A fork means you can easily send me a "pull request" of your change, and I can review and integrate it, all within github.

You'll also find a branch called "upstream", which is Simon's code whenever I last synced. Handy for diffs, to see what I broke on Android. :-)

This repository includes old git-svn commits that predate upstream's move to git. History will look slightly nicer if, after cloning, you do:

git fetch origin 'refs/replace/*:refs/replace/*'

Sadly github itself does not appear to support replacement so you will still see duplicates there.

You should now be able to edit, build and launch the app like any other Android project (except a lot of it is in C). Don't forget that you'll be signing with a dev key, so to test on a device that already has the Google Play version, uninstall that first.

Architecture / where to find stuff

Simon has some excellent developer documentation which is definitely worth reading first, at least the Introduction.

The Android front-end (android.c) is basically just glue, passing everything to Java. The Java classes providing the UI layer, game chooser, etc. are in app/src/main/java. The main class GamePlay has the native methods that android.c implements. The game area on screen is a GameView, which basically just has a bitmap for the puzzle to draw on. Note that almost no native code is run until the user has chosen a game (unless there's a previous game to resume).

Files for other platforms etc. that are not currently usable in this fork are in the not-in-use directory.

If your change is relevant to other platforms, you should definitely ping Simon about it as well as me, but test on at least one other platform first in a separate checkout (see above).

Major changes e.g. adding a game

At this level you especially need to think carefully about other platforms. One of the best features of this collection is its relative consistency across different environments, and the Android port should continue that.

If adding a game, definitely read the relevant chapter (6) of Simon's development docs, and add the new game to the places I've gone and duplicated the list just for Android...

• app/src/main/res/values/strings.xml
• app/src/main/res/values/game_props.xml
• ...and possibly others.

Happy hacking! :-)

Chris Boyle