Cube 2 on ARM - my results so far

by Buggy on 07/07/2014 02:50, 0 messages, last message: 07/07/2014 02:50, 1718 views, last view: 04/14/2024 08:15

I recently had the idea to try and get Sauterbraten to work on ARM processors, in particular to try and get it to run on the popular Raspberry PI minicomputer. I wanted to see if this is possible because I own a Raspberry PI, and while it isn't exactly a gaming pc it's still sorely lacking any good FPS games, and the RPI community would probably really appreciate having as active and popular a game for it.

At first, I thought it would be at least technically possible, Saturbraten can run at 60fps+ at maximum graphical settings on all but the largest maps on my several years old, cheap laptop, so the PI could probably run it on low settings. Saturbraten also is open source, and has a active modding community, which would help a lot. The PI also supports several different operating systems, the most popular of which is a version of Linux called Raspbian, so it seems the only barrier is getting Saturbraten to run on ARM instead of x86.

On further research, I found that Cube has been ported to ARM before, but not Cube 2(http://cubeengine.com/forum.php4?action=display_thread&thread_id=2099&start=0). The PI supports SDL and Opengl, but like most ARM systems it's Opengl ES, not the version Saturbraten uses, so it won't be as simple as just a recompile. I still can't verify performance wise if it would be sufficient, but Saturbraten is honestly the most efficient, least demanding game for how good it looks that I've ever seen, so I'm almost certain it would be playable.

The PI is entirely capable of running modernish fps games, someone ported Quake 3 to it and it is entirely playable if overclocked, so it seems the only major issue besides unforseen incompatibilities is getting the game to work on Opengl ES, which, as far as I can tell, wouldn't be a gargantuan task. Sadly, I'm not a coder, so I'm not capable of doing this myself. If anyone else more familiar with this stuff wants to give it a shot, or correct any misconceptions I have, feel free.

Summary/tl;dr: Porting Cube 2 to ARM appears to be entirely possible code and performance wise, but it requires porting the game to Opengl ES.

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