Make Widelands mobile compatible (Android, iPhone(?), FirefoxOS (?),...)

[Nasenbaer]

Widelands is currently crossplatform compatible and runs on many different operating systems and architectures (I even got it to run on an arm-pocessor with linux operating system).
However there are some major problems that keep Widelands from being 100% compatible to mobile devices:
* The control with touch displays has to be programmed and should be activated via compile arguments (even better cmake should find out, which control types are valid for the target platform)
    - The readme should be different to explain the control (this can be handled by exchanging the readme file or by a code switch that simply loads a different text file).
* Some parts of the OpenGL code might be incompatible (I have read some post on the bug tracker and the widelands chat about OpenGL-ES, but seriously I do not know what has to be done and how much has to be done).
* We have to check that all used libraries are working on the target plattforms (e.g. SDL 2.0 has an official android port, for SDL 1.2 there is http://libsdl-android.sourceforge.net/)

[SirVer (sirver)]

I agree that this is very important. The future of gaming seems to be on mobile, i.e. android (for us right now). iOs would be nice, but there are a bunch of legal issues to be determined, i.e. who gets the money from selling the app and who pays for the app fees that apple asks.

Android is a first target imho.

[Jens Beyer (qcumber-some)]

Apple mobile devices could probably be impossible to target.
GPL is probably not compatible to Apple's conditions regarding the App Store.

More can be found at the 'web, for a start you may look here: https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance

[SirVer (sirver)]

It has been done before, I am not too concerned about this licensing issue: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/battle-for-wesnoth-hd/id575852062?mt=8

[Shevonar (shevonar)]

However, it was not easy for Wesnoth and caused a lot of discussion: http://lwn.net/Articles/396535/

[SirVer (sirver)]

That link makes for an interesting read indeed. However, I say we cross this bridge when we get there. Let's start with google play which is easier to target anyways as it is better supported by sdl2 (as far as I understand). And if this works we can turn to ios and figure out the legal implications.

[SirVer (sirver)]

Setting to incomplete for bug sweeping.

[SirVer (sirver)]

The original post mentions three issues. The second one (porting to OpenGL ES) is tracked

The third one (have compatible libraries) is tracked in https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/1380048 - porting to SDL2. SDL2 runs on everything that I care to target in the near future, so that should be good enough.

[SirVer (sirver)]

Copy & pasto: the OpenGL ES bug is https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/984372.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Migrated to https://github.com/widelands/widelands/issues/428