I’m not sure if Unity forum is appropriate for this kind of question, but I’m wondering if anyone here know how to port games to Android so I’d feel like it’s running natively. I tried a few emulators here and there but none of them feel particularly good, I always encounter sound problems, crashes, lags, control issues, etc. I’d like to learn how to do it the proper way myself.
The game series I’m thinking of is Gothic 1-3. The public interest is probably non existent, and original game developers lost their rights for the game, so I’m thinking that playing my favorite childhood games on my phone or something like Nintendo Switch is probably not going to happen unless I can learn how to do it myself. And overall it feels like a useful skill to learn. Unfortunately, there’s very little information I can find online for some reason. If you know any reading materials, please share it with me, I’d highly appreciate it!
Basically, the way you port an older PC game to android is to recreate the entire game from scratch using Unity or some other android development platform.
Not really. It would be different from game to game. I think your best bet would be to see if there is a modding community surrounding the game in question. They may have more information about the game’s assets.
Thing is without source code this is an impossible project. So you would need to contact the developers, and if you have no prior experience of porting software chances are slim they will let you do that
Yes, you’re right. Maybe there are other smaller projects that I can work on to learn how to port this kind of software. Thanks for your input so far, it’s really helpful! My end goal is a lot more realistic now!
Anyway seems like a huge endeavour, I looked at many project, it seems the circumvent legal issue by basically being alternative engine that takes as input the original files, so you need the original games.
That mean reverse engineering engine and files, it’s a bit like reverse modding, instead of changing the files and reuse the engine, we change the engine and reuse the file.
Some big project in that field do use unity, such as daggerfall (now completely ported) and san andreas.
The Gothic 2 project seems to be completely reversed engineered and it’s playable as far as I know. I will test their build in a few days. If they were able to do it, then I see why it wouldn’t be possible for Gothic 3 as well. I read on Gitter that one developer was able to do the same with Diablo 1, all by himself in 4 months.
I’m currently learning C++ and how to decompile .exe files. I want to study Gothic 3 as much as I can and maybe eventually rebuild it on Unity.
I also tried to slide into Piranha Bytes’ twitter and facebook DMs asking for the source code lol. A few people told me so far that I don’t even need a source code to make it work. One of the modder teams has Gothic 3 source code somewhere, so it’s possible to ask around more.
