Homebrew BillardGL comes to the Wii after 22 years

[mudrik]

Some of you might be old enough to remember the nice open source 3D game BillardGL from the early thousands (from 2002, precisely). It's written in C++ using OpenGL 1.1, which as we all know, is not supported by the Wii. Well, at least until a wise guy wrote opengx, a library that wraps the GX API presenting it as the OpenGL API. The project was abandoned back in 2009, but the author was so kind to write detailed documentation on the design of this project, that it would have been a waste not to put it into use.

So, recently the opengx project has been revived and functionality has been added to make it support more of OpenGL 1.1. We are still far from the finish line, but it's nice to see that a non trivial game like BillardGL could be ported with almost no changes to the code.

You are welcome to visit the project at https://github.com/mardy/billardgl/tree/wii-port - see the "Releases" section for a downloadable zip file to add the game to your Homebrew channel.

Please note that not all changes required to builg the game have been integrated into opengx yet, so if you want to build the game from source, you'll need this branch.

 

[DDinghoya]

Some of you might be old enough to remember the nice open source 3D game BillardGL from the early thousands (from 2002, precisely). It's written in C++ using OpenGL 1.1, which as we all know, is not supported by the Wii. Well, at least until a wise guy wrote opengx, a library that wraps the GX API presenting it as the OpenGL API. The project was abandoned back in 2009, but the author was so kind to write detailed documentation on the design of this project, that it would have been a waste not to put it into use.

So, recently the opengx project has been revived and functionality has been added to make it support more of OpenGL 1.1. We are still far from the finish line, but it's nice to see that a non trivial game like BillardGL could be ported with almost no changes to the code.
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You are welcome to visit the project at https://github.com/mardy/billardgl/tree/wii-port - see the "Releases" section for a downloadable zip file to add the game to your Homebrew channel.

Please note that not all changes required to builg the game have been integrated into opengx yet, so if you want to build the game from source, you'll need this branch.

Is there a way to add Korean fonts for translation?

 

[mudrik]

Is there a way to add Korean fonts for translation?

It's not easy for me to reply, since I'm not the original author of the game, and it's all written in German :-(

If someone is able to figure out how to add additional fonts I'll be glad to accept code contributions, but I'm afraid I don't have time to spend on this myself.

 

[DDinghoya]

It's not easy for me to reply, since I'm not the original author of the game, and it's all written in German :-(

If someone is able to figure out how to add additional fonts I'll be glad to accept code contributions, but I'm afraid I don't have time to spend on this myself.

I don't know the program, but it seems to call the characters in buchstaben.bmp and buchstabenalpha.bmp as fonts. (\billardgl\Texturen\2)

 

[Disorarara]

Would be this useful for getting hardware acceleration working on Wii Linux?

 

[mudrik]

Would be this useful for getting hardware acceleration working on Wii Linux?

I haven't tried to build opengx for Wii Linux, but in principle it should work.

 

[KleinesSinchen]

and it's all written in German

WTF? Who writes programs with file names, comments and variable/method names in other languages?

I don't even do that for my occasional toddler level hobby programming just for myself. I could easily translate all the text in the sources, but man, doing this correctly not missing any references so that it still compiles, that is a hard piece of work.

Somebody good with awk and sed might be able to do it quickly in semi-automated manner. Or maybe some IDE can assist? These bloated things nowadays have 1000s of functions.