Hello everybody, I'm a total noob on videogame programming, but my searches concerning what I wanted to do make made me think this forum could be the right place to ask my question. I would like to port a great game from windows to GNU (Linux) and release it under GPL. But I have no idea how difficult (or not possible) it could be. The game is written in java (good point for my "porting question"), but also in C++ with the 3D engine which is working with nebula device and this game uses directX. So my questions are : -Is it possible to port code from Nebula-device, directX to something else released under GPL ? -How difficult is it ? -What do I need to do first ? Then... If someone could help me understanding all that it would be really great, I would be very sad not to be able to work with openGL. Thanks for reading me :)

Porting requires source code. Are you licensed to modify and distribute the game? Typically (but not always) this means, is it open source? If you are not licensed to port it, porting is legally impossible.

Assuming you cleared that hurdle, the Nebula Device is supposedly able to use OpenGL as a backend, but I admit to knowing very little about it, and the easily accessible information about the engine is horrendous. I suspect the original game used an older version of the engine, which was DirectX-only. If that's the case, porting could involve updating the code to use the latest API. How difficult that is depends on how much the API is changed.

Java is supposed to be cross-platform as well, though that has a tendency to cause trouble as well.

Perhaps you could point us to the game, and we could give you better answers?

Thanks for your reply.

I've got the source code, and this game should be released under GPL in the future, no problem with this.

You're right, it's an old version of nebula (intermediate between 1.0 and 2.0.

Are you sure about nebula 2 supporting openGL ? I tought I've read it was a work in progress.

Anyway, the version 3 is out now http://flohofwoe.blogspot.com/2009/11/nebula3-sdk-nov-2009-changelog.html so it should be the "future", if we have to port it on a new version, il should be the last one. The problem is that there's no mention of openGL, it's only supported on windows and directX :(

If anyone can confirm nebula2 supports openGL, it would be great (assuming that nebula3 will support openGL and GNU(Linux)).



What about it being ported with another 3D engine such as Ogre or an another open-source projet ?
Assuming lot of the coding was done in java and a few with nebula would it be possible, long, how much difficult, to port it with another engine ?

I was going from Sourceforge, where it says right in the summary that it supports Linux and OpenGL. But actually looking into it, that doesn't appear to be the case.

Unfortunately it can't be a true port without using the Nebula Device. It can be rewritten using OGRE or some other engine, but that'll be a great deal more work.