Mobile/Console version

[cvb941]

Hello,

I was really excited to see this project. I read your blog and I was also liking the original BiPlanes, especially the bluetooth multiplayer back in the days. I'm a mobile developer, and I've tried to recreate a biplanes game some 10+ years ago so that I could play it again. I have a screenshot here 😀

I didn't really finish it or anything, even though it had a working multiplayer. I also couldn't get the physics right, I was just guessing what I remembered about the original BiPlanes behaviour. That is why I was so surprised that you were able to recreate the original with the exact same code and assets. It was amazing playing it again with the look and feel how I remember it.

I think the game should be published for mobile, so it could be played like the old times. Also, a web version would make it more accessible to other people, who would like to try playing it again. What do you think?

[Casqade]

Hello, @cvb941
First of all, thank you for recognising my work 😁 Even after 5 years, receiving these occasional little acclaims remind me this project was well worth the time spent on it.

Regarding your question/request, unfortunately there are a lot of complications:

1. Publishing the game on Google Play and similar platforms might be risky. Eventhough the original version is now an abandonware and it's quite hard to track down who owns rights to the game, I have a suspicion the chain of company acquisitions leads to one of the Big publishers of today. And publishing an APK here would hardly increase accessibility, as Google & Apple do everything it takes to complicate installation of 3rd party apps on their systems.

2. Since I spent the majority of my school years with either a cellphone or a very dated smartphone, I've never actually gotten into mobile gaming in modern sense. This effectively makes me hardly a suitable person for the job :) Not to mention the fact I never developed for mobile and web.

3. Original game was meant to be played with button-like controls, and I don't see how it would work with touchscreen input. It just would feel very awkward and unresponsive to play, because to my very limited view:

• two thumbs are not enough for both firing and controlling the plane, or at least I can't think up of any control scheme which would allow precise & intuitive input. On cellphone I could get around that by pressing 2 buttons with 1 thumb, whereas touchscreen would probably get confused faced with such trickery;
• plane directions are fixed by design, which complicates responsiveness even more;

4. As the game uses fixed aspect ratio to stay true to the original, black bars also wouldn't look well on wide smartphone screen. Again, this means the game would require major rewrite of not only input, but resolution scaling & camera viewport as well. Oh, and I also smell the sweet times of dozens game .jar versions for different screen sizes 😂

5. Mobile multiplayer... Well, good luck trying to punch through mobile ISPs NATs :)

6. On the other hand, web version is technically a more viable option, since my implementation is based on SDL2 and maybe it can be ported using something like Emscripten and hosted on itch.io. BUT it would probably be single-player only, as I've no idea whether current netcode is even compatible with browser environment.

Besides, I already spent almost all my coding years returning to this project from time to time, and I definitely don't want to spend months & years porting this game AGAIN for 2 completely different platforms (it already runs on Windows, Linux & macOS, mind you)... It was a perfect passion project for first coding experiences, but right now I have to pursue other interests.

All in all, I laid out my thoughts on the topic. This project is open source, so if you want to port the game to mobile/web yourself, you are free to look at the code, and I'll gladly answer any questions about the implementation. Afterall, since you've been in mobile development for so long (I've been coding for only 6 years at best, compared to your 10+), you are much more experienced and competent to get this kind of job right than me 👍

[cvb941]

Thank you for your detailed response, I understand everything :)

I would like to take a go at porting the game to mobile or web, but the C++ ecosystem is in turn unfamiliar to me and I'm afraid it would take a significant amount of effort.

So maybe in the future there will be more time to tackle this. Or who knows, an AI agent will port this to Unity or something and make it run on all of the platforms in a couple of minutes😁

Thanks again for this project!

[Casqade]

@cvb941, I managed to port the game to WebAssembly. It's now live on both our itch.io page & official website.
Indeed, Emscripten is like a magic button which allows porting properly structured SDL2-based projects with minimal effort (it took me roughly ~3 evenings). I mostly had to restructure my main loop and struggle with HTML gibberish.

Unfortunately, though, I also had to disable online multiplayer because UDP networking is not available in browsers (or DOES IT?). So, for the time being, the Web version can be considered merely a demo.

Anyway, with the proxying approach suggested in Emscripten docs, I always get tons of runtime JS errors/exceptions when I add -sPROXY_TO_PTHREAD flag (the game doesn't even initialise). If I just add all other required flags, the whole tab simply hangs upon socket creation. This whole concept of Browser<->JS<->WASM interoperation is way beyond my competence, so I leave it for future generations to solve :)

I'll soon update Emscripten branch so it builds with cut features, but it's up to others to make it run. I also suspect these problems could come from html template, as I basically got the default one from Emscripten and ripped all the redundant UI.
(I'm not even sure I got all the alignments/paddings/sizes right)

[cvb941]

Good job @Casqade, I can finally play the game on web, it's great! Even without networking 😁

[Casqade]

Technically, it's trivial to introduce touch screen input processing logic to allow web version to be played on mobile devices as well. But as I mentioned earlier, the code alone is not enough for making comfortable & responsive controls - UI/UX is more difficult to get right

[KingBeanie44]

hey guys, i wanted to ask for a mobile version as well but i can understand the reasons against it.

BUT

it's running great in winlator. and there we've touch controls or we can use the controller (tested on retroid pocket classic and odin 2/ mini) :)

[Casqade]

@KingBeanie44, thanks for the feedback! May I ask a couple of questions:

1. Did you manage to run multiplayer on your setup?
2. Is web version playable with the controller?

[KingBeanie44]

Quick Photo that it's working in winlator

1. Tried it, but didn't get it to Work
2. Sadly not

[DvaMishkiLapa]

Now it works on PS Vita :D
Although there are still many things to fix...
I couldn't find your contact details with a quick search, so I wanted to ask you. Would you mind if I posted the finished files on GitHub and VitaDB when I'm done?
Of course, I will credit you as the original author of the port.

[Casqade]

@DvaMishkiLapa, WOW, that's cool! I see you're putting a lot of effort into your fork. And, by the way, it's actually the first active fork of the project!

Ideally, it would be best to have all ports in the main repository to make it easier to deliver new versions (there's at least 1 planned future update from me), but the codebase wasn't really designed for that, unfortunately. I learned it the hard way while doing the Emscripten port :(

So, you are free to post your code wherever you see fit, preserving the original project name/title

[DvaMishkiLapa]

@Casqade is biplanes-revival-vita Ok?
Yes :D I noticed that the code is not entirely modular. However, thanks to SDL2, I was able to run your port with minimal changes.

I think that in terms of Emscripten, the controls will only work on the keyboard, since you only process SDL presses from it. I changed them to gamepad controls in my port.

PS Vita is more to blame here. Working with files, keystrokes, and the network will bring about major changes. I'm not sure I have the skills to separate it all. It will be easier for me to merge your changes manually when there is a new update.

[DvaMishkiLapa]

And matchmaking will not work, because port 50005 on PS Vita is reserved by the system. Could you provide the option to select a port?
Reserved ports are 1-1023, 9293-9308, 40000-65535.