Android port of Simon Tatham's Puzzles

This is Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection, ported to Android.

The easiest way to install it is from Google Play.

If you'd like to get involved, read on:

Project goals

• Run in Android environments where puzzles make sense: phones, tablets, Chromebooks, maybe TVs, not watches or cars.
• Provide the same puzzle collection that the upstream project provides for other platforms.
• Provide appropriate controls for Android environments, e.g. on-screen buttons and the use of long-press instead of right-click.
• Provide appropriate display adjustments for mobile use-cases, e.g. night mode, and minor changes to the recommended sizes of puzzles.
• Run completely offline, including the documentation, and with minimum required permissions.
• Follow Android conventions: implicit saving of games in progress, standard settings screen with immediate apply, etc.
• Make it easy to exchange saved puzzle states with other users and other platforms.

Potential/experimental goals, that could exist on Android before potentially being included upstream later:

• Accessibility improvements relative to upstream.
• Translate the Puzzles into more languages: first fix issue #1 properly to allow translating strings that come from C, which is most of them. I don't yet know how to fix that, and I don't recommend starting work on any translations until it's fixed.
• Make it easier to have multiple states of the same game in progress, without having to manage files.

Non-goals for this project

I do not want to make certain kinds of changes that I think would make the Android port too different from upstream:

• New games that don't exist upstream.
• Changes to game rules (implemented or documented) versus upstream.
• Timers, scoring, or high-score tables that differ from upstream.
• Hints or other progress feedback that differs from upstream.

Any suggestions in this category should be sent upstream to Simon, as per the Feedback section of his page, and if any such improvements are accepted upstream then I'll merge them into the Android port if at all possible.

You're welcome to discuss changes of this kind on this project's issue tracker, applying the tag upstream to issues to reflect that they won't be implemented here directly.

How to help without writing any code

Good bug reports and well-thought-out feature suggestions (bearing in mind the above) are always helpful; here's the issue tracker. It's always worth a quick search to see if your bug/idea has already been reported.

Simon has an excellent page on how to write a good bug report.

Need to add/change some graphics? The sources live in app/src/main/graphics-sources and were converted to icons with Android Asset Studio

Coders should read on...

Prerequisites

Some knowledge of Android Development and/or C, and ideally JNI, depending on what you want to work on: the puzzles themselves are in C, most Android-specific code is in Kotlin, and JNI (Java Native Interface) is the API bridge between the two.

If you have the option, a Linux-based development machine, as I haven't tried to build on Windows or OSX, and it will need some tweaks.

Android Studio

Android NDK (Native Development Kit)

If using gradle directly, create local.properties with sdk.dir=/your_path_here (I think Android Studio writes this automatically)

I probably missed a few things here. File a bug when you find them. :-)

Getting/configuring the source

The source lives at https://github.com/chrisboyle/sgtpuzzles - you can either clone/download it from there, or make your own fork on github (the Fork button near the top right). A fork means you can easily send me a "pull request" of your change, and I can review and integrate it, all within github.

You'll also find a branch called upstream, which is Simon's code whenever I last synced. Handy for diffs, to see what I broke on Android. :-)

This repository includes old git-svn commits that predate upstream's move to git. History will look slightly nicer if, after cloning, you do:

git fetch origin 'refs/replace/*:refs/replace/*'

Sadly github itself does not appear to support replacement so you will still see duplicates there.

You should now be able to edit, build and launch the app like any other Android project (except a lot of it is in C). Don't forget that you'll be signing with a dev key, so to test on a device that already has the Google Play version, uninstall that first.

Architecture / where to find stuff

Simon has some excellent developer documentation which is definitely worth reading first, at least the Introduction.

The Android front-end (android.c) is basically just glue, passing everything to Kotlin. The Kotlin classes providing the UI layer, game chooser, etc. are in app/src/main/kotlin. The main class GamePlay has the native methods that android.c implements. The game area on screen is a GameView, which basically just has a bitmap for the puzzle to draw on. Note that almost no native code is run until the user has chosen a game (unless there's a previous game to resume).

Files for other platforms etc. that are not currently usable in this fork are in the not-in-use directory.

If your change is relevant to other platforms, you should definitely ping Simon about it as well as me, but test on at least one other platform first in a separate checkout (see above).

Happy hacking! :-)

-- Chris Boyle