vassal for android?

This is a MUST…With todays Tech…I would love to see this come up in the near future. Imagine…Playing on a nice medium size tablet instead of lugging around a heavy Laptop?? :smiley:

Thus spake “awmiller.andros”:

I just tapped into this thread today, and I am excited to see that
android is within the interest of the vassal developers. I would also
like to contribute what I can, what needs to be done yet?

One thing which would be helpful is if someone would find out about
compilers targeting Android—in particular, if there is a Linux-hosted
gcc cross-compiler.


J.

The Android SDK is cross-platform and runs on Linux:

developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

Now, Android doesn’t run a standard JVM and the system APIs are different,
so I don’t think you can just cross-compile.
For a quick summary look at

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison … ndroid_API

In particular, Swing is not supported. So getting the current Vassal on
Android would require some work.

As for Vassal 4, moving away from Java would make things a bit trickier,
but not impossible:
developer.android.com/tools/sdk/ndk/index.html

programmers.stackexchange.com/qu … ng-c-and-c

On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 5:38 AM, Joel Uckelman uckelman@nomic.net wrote:

Thus spake “awmiller.andros”:

I just tapped into this thread today, and I am excited to see that
android is within the interest of the vassal developers. I would also
like to contribute what I can, what needs to be done yet?

One thing which would be helpful is if someone would find out about
compilers targeting Android—in particular, if there is a Linux-hosted
gcc cross-compiler.


J.


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There are a few ways to get Vassal on an android tablet… sortof:

  • CHEAT: run a remote desktop client to connect to your OSX, Windows or Linux machine. The RDP proctocol for windows or Nomachine’s NX for OSX or Linux give the best performance, VNC works but is a bit slow for graphically intense programs like Vassal. There are RDP and NX clients for Android. For IPad/IOS there is no NX client yet, but it’s coming in December 2013.
    The nice thing with this is that you can sit on the couch or on the table playing Vassal with skype or google hangout in the background - and you can switch to your desktop when needed.

  • JAILBREAK: Install Linux on your Android tablet , so you can run the required JRE to run Vassal. As the memory usage of Vassal and the JVM are high you have to have a tablet with lots of memory (> 512)
    kali.org/how-to/kali-linux-a … ux-deploy/
    Conceivably it might be possible to run Vassal on a jailbroken Windows RT tablet with IKVM.net - but as this is a different Java VM it might have a lot of bugs. The same goes for installing Java on a jailbroken iPad. I’ve not tried it.

  • USE WINTEL TABLETS: While the Surface Pro is expensive and the new Haswell powered tablets as well, there wil be cheaper Bay Trail powered windows8 tablets which can run Vassal natively. If you don’t like windows you can put Ubuntu linux on it.

  • PORT Vassal to Android, rewrite everything for the Dalvik JVM (a subset of Java) and when this is complete use a transcompiler like J2ObjC or XMLVM, to convert Java code to Objective-C/C++ for iOS. By the time this is done however (2014-2020) a Tizen, Jolla/Sailfish or Ubuntu mobile OS might have taken over marketshare from Android - and a port to these systems might be easier.

  • MORE MONEY: The bottleneck with these methods is the same as with iPad board game development - depending on your favorite Vassal boardgame playing a boardgame on a < 10 inch touchscreen area can be tedious. The best way is to use the large screen 18" tablets like the HP Envy 20 TouchSmart or Dell XPS 18 Touch which are running native Windows8 anyway. I am not sure if they are to comfortable to use on the couch or in the bathtub, they same a bit heavy to hold.