retracktor dev log

Over the past two days I have (unsuccessfully) tried to compile a simple Android app with a rust based SDL core to check out how easy it would be to build an Android app.

Turns out, not very easy. There are some good tutorials and it seems possible in theory, but I failed to compile both SDLimage and SDLttf for Android, because I am not very familiar with Android NDK. It is doable, all these libraries have Android specific build scripts, but anything I tried failed.

I'm sure I'll get this done eventually but it is clear to me that I shouldn't have wasted so much time (and, frankly, energy) on this and should have instead focused on the other stuff.

I did, however, managed to get started with a simple text system based on pixel fonts (basically, a PNG sprite sheet at this point) and found a lovely TTF rendition of the original Protracker font that allowed me to quickly whip up the PNG. The reason I am thinking about using a pixel font is because SDLttf is not exactly easy to use anyway and simply having one texture around (I could, of course, generate that on the fly with SDLttf) and blitting small images into a canvas seems much more efficient for now.

I also played around with scaling and it seems like a 1x pixel font will give quite crisp text when scaled up with canvas.copy() (SDL_RenderCopy in original SDL parlance), so this should work great for building a simple, mostly text based UI.