Ufo2000

[Serge]

A turn based tactical strategy multiplayer game UFO2000 (http://ufo2000.sourceforge.net) gets ported to Nokia 770. See this thread in UFO2000 forum (http://www.xcomufo.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=8451) to get the information about the latest progress. Well, right now UFO2000 porting is on hold because MPlayer seems to be more interesting for maemo community. But I hope to get back to game development as soon as multimedia and video support issues get resolved and Nokia 770 becomes a really excellent device for playing video :)

Anyway, even now there is a binary build of UFO2000 (see the last posts in UFO2000 forum thread) that anyone who is interested can easily try. It is better to test it along with PC version to get familiar with the controls used in the game. Suggestions about improving usability are welcome.

[Hedgecore]

I loved the XCOM games back when they first came out, and have tried UFO2000 on the 770... I think the reason there might not be much response for the 770 version is because the *nix version is limited to multiplayer (so far as I can tell)... I always had more fun researching and base building a la the single player mode.

[Serge]

We (ufo2000 developers) also have plans for single player mode. At least AI opponent for playing single missions is going to be added for sure.

But as Nokia 770 is internet centered device, playing ufo2000 online may be also an interesting option for maemo community. Check ufo2000 server status page (http://ufo2000.xcomufo.com:2000/), there is almost always someone playing the game, and you may find human opponents more challenging than a stupid AI in the original X-COM games :)

[ArnimS]

*Bump*

What is status on UFO2000? I see memory footprint claims to be down to 15MB, which is good news. This looks like a potential winner for the 770.

[sevenape]

I'm rubbing my hands with glee at the thought of playing this badboy on my 770 :)

[Serge]

Thanks for your interest in this game guys, I will build a proper .deb package for 770 shortly. I hope that at least some of you tried PC version of ufo2000 already?

[ArnimS]

Thanks for your interest in this game guys, I will build a proper .deb package for 770 shortly. I hope that at least some of you tried PC version of ufo2000 already?

Actually testers should be happy to test without a deb package.

I saw you mention lack of feedback, and that saddens me, this is one of the better linux games out there. I guess the tablet gaming community is pretty small.

I grabbed the garage tgz... will look at it soon. Thanks for your work ssvb.

[Hedgecore]

It's not just that... I think I'm an odd job, but I use my 770 commuting... sans internet. Rarely is it ever online while I'm out of the house. :) (I did however try previous versions of UFO and they were awesome - - just like old times!)

[begemot]

How to use this file? I was a big fan of XCOM more than 10 years ago.

[cosmo]

patiently waiting

[Serge]

Hi everyone, thanks for raising this topic from dead.

I'm extremely busy at work at the moment (almost everyone else is on vacation here), so almost all my activity in maemo development is suspended now (the same applies to mplayer maintenance). But I have plans to get back to ufo2000 porting as soon as I get a vacation myself.

If you want to try the game on your device, go to the garage project page https://garage.maemo.org/projects/ufo2000/ and download tarball. After that you can run the following commands in xterm on your device (be sure to extract the game to a unix friendly filesystem, it can be internal flash or ext2/ext3 formatted memory card):

tar -xzf ufo2000-0.7.1056-armel.tar.gz
cd ufo2000-0.7.1056
./ufo2000


This version is a bit dated and you will not be able to play on the server against opponents using the most recent versions of ufo2000, so ufo2000 package will need to be refreshed anyway.

Technical challenges of ufo2000 maemo port:
* virtual keyboard - as ufo2000 is network game, ability to chat is quite important. I also thought about the idea of simply providing some area for handwriting with stylus and just sending pictures to the opponent
* right mouse click emulation - tap on screen while holding one of the keys pressed may be the best solution
* reduce cpu usage, currently cpu is maxed and battery will not live long - something like static scenes detector is needed in order to avoid repetitive rendering of the same frames
* memory usage optimizations - right now all the resources are loaded to memory on initialization which also results in a very long loading time not to mention

Overall improvements which are needed:
* some kind of AI

[LordFu]

Thanks for the update!

[Overgauss]

Can't wait to give this a try!

[jself]

Anything happening with this yet?

[Serge]

Not yet. Moreover, the upstream project has slowed down almost to the standstill soon after I stopped actively looking after it :( But thanks for bumping the thread.