ZMPP for Android released

weiju · December 28, 2011, 9:15am

Hi folks,

hope you had some nice Christmas holidays. Just wanted to let you know that I just released an Android version of ZMPP on the Market. It’s based on the ZMPP2 core that I rewrote in Scala. For now I focused on the Z-Machine and I’ll watch how things turn out.
Check it out if you like (it’s free, but displays ads in the browser screen).

Best,

Wei-ju

Dannii · January 12, 2012, 1:49am

Would it be possible to have a release for 2.1?

weiju · January 12, 2012, 3:19am

Do you mean Glulx ?

kevinjardine · January 12, 2012, 7:20am

Would it be possible to support landscape orientation for those of us with slider keyboards?

Kevin

Emerald · January 12, 2012, 9:59am

Seconded. I downloaded ZMPP and it looks really nice, but it’s disappointing not to be able to use my lovely QWERTY keyboard with it.

Dannii · January 12, 2012, 10:42am

No I mean for Android 2.1.

weiju · January 12, 2012, 3:04pm

Hi,

hardware keyboard maybe, Android 2.1 probably not.

The Dalvik JIT compiler is included in 2.2. I know that quite a bit of devices still run 2.1, and Infocom games do run quite well on a non-JIT device, but I wouldn’t do Inform 7 games a favor if they could be only be played in slow motion.
It is likely that the Android version will at some point run Glulx/Glk stories and performance-wise, those are even more of a challenge on average.
One of the things I am currently looking into is hardware keyboard support, but I don’t know when that will happen.

Wei-ju

kevinjardine · January 12, 2012, 6:08pm

ZMPP works fine with my Xperia Pro hardware keyboard. All that is missing is landscape orientation so that I don’t have to keep rotating the phone.

weiju · January 12, 2012, 6:13pm

oh well… hey Dannii, I decided to upload a package where I lowered the requirements to Android 2.1 in the Downloads section of ZMPP’s github page (unlikely that I will do that on an app store version):

github.com/weiju/zmpp2

This is a current development snapshot, I briefly tested it on a 2.1 emulator, so don’t say I did not warn you before

Wei-ju

Laroquod · January 13, 2012, 3:08am

That will be the day I’m waiting for, since we already have Z-machine interpreters for Android. Thanks and good luck with this project!

P.S. I don’t actually have an Android device, but my playtesters do. I lost a couple because they couldn’t play Glulx on their mobile devices and they just ‘never got around’ to making time on the desktop. 40-somethings, eh? 8)

weiju · January 13, 2012, 4:49am

… I guess if you are doing things in a hurry, you can’t do them right… The development snapshot still needs more work than I thought, so I pulled it and replaced it with the current release version.

Sorry for the confusion.

Wei-ju

sjwoo · January 25, 2012, 3:48pm

If you can get landscape mode in here, then this will be the best intfic android app…thank you!

weiju · January 25, 2012, 4:56pm

looks like it was a good decision to sneak that into the next release I am testing right now, hopefully I’ll be able to get it out this the weekend.

weiju · January 30, 2012, 1:52am

just as an info, today I released a new ZMPP version on Android Market, which (among other enhancements) adds the option to play in landscape mode.

Jeff_Zeitlin · January 30, 2012, 10:41pm

What are the requirements for this that the Market thinks that it’s not compatible with my NookColor with N2A card (and therefore won’t let me download it)?

weiju · January 30, 2012, 11:13pm

Hi, I have no idea, I am learning about N2A cards for the first time - but if you wait a couple of days there is a chance that you can download it from Barnes & Noble directly since I submitted it there yesterday.

Edit: Maybe this: http://support.n2acards.com/entries/20855851-incompatible-app-error ?

ZMPP does has a restriction on resolution, but the Nook Color is definitely up to the task, since that’s the main device I am using for IF.

Jeff_Zeitlin · January 30, 2012, 11:49pm

Thanks, Wei-ju, that did it! I can now download ZMPP (and will, later, just to try it and compare with Twisty), as well as a couple of other apps that the Market was claiming weren’t compatible.

Emerald · February 1, 2012, 11:26pm

Excellent, thanks! (Admittedly, I thought at first it wasn’t working… I didn’t realise it had to be turned on manually in the preferences.)

weiju · February 2, 2012, 3:51am

Hi Emily,

thanks for the feedback, glad it works for you ! I unfortunately don’t have any device with a hardware keyboard (and as a Colemak typist, QWERTY would only be of limited use for me anyways ), so this is a feature that I can only test in an emulator.

Wei-ju

kevinjardine · February 2, 2012, 6:31am

Just finished playing through Shade using the latest version of ZMPP with a hardware keyboard and landscape mode. Mostly worked very well although there were a couple of times when text in longer descriptions scrolled past before I could read the top bit.

Kevin