Pocket Palm Heroes

This project tries to bring good old Palm Heroes/Pocket Heroes back to life. The work was started in 2017.

Pocket Palm Heroes is an original turn-based strategy for different devices, that is made in the style and feel of the old-school "Heroes of Might and Magic" game. Pocket Palm Heroes plunges you into the atmosphere of exciting fantasy adventures and epic battles! Lead your heroes as a barbarian orc chief, a noble knight, a mighty wizard, a fast beautiful sorceress, a warlock, or a creepy undead necromancer! As your kingdom grows in size, and your heroes get more powerful, you will discover new places, learn new skills and magic, and fight different monsters!

Play online!

It's available at GitHub Pages: https://servb.github.io/pph/.

Running from sources

To run the game, clone the repo and execute the following commands:

# Pack resources (needed only once or after changes in resources):
./gradlew :packResources      # for Linux/Mac
.\gradlew.bat :packResources  # for Windows

# Run app:
./gradlew :runJvm      # for Linux/Mac
.\gradlew.bat :runJvm  # for Windows

Java needs to be installed on the computer.

What we have

Sources of different versions

Unsurprisingly, this project is based on the following source codes:

1. https://github.com/sigman78/pocketheroes/ (available under Apache 2.0 license) — 1.04 beta. Can be compiled even in Visual Studio 2019 (Community) but with some effort (feel free to ask for help at Discord if you want to compile them).
2. https://sourceforge.net/projects/palmheroes/ (available under Apache 2.0 license) — seems to be 1.03. Can't be compiled because of lack of some files. Also, there is many code that is related to licence registration (take a look at commits).

The sources are old (not the latest 1.05). Let's primarily use the 1.04 beta version.

Change logs

Change logs are needed to fix the old sources and upgrade the version to the final known one — 1.05.

• 0.02, 0.03, 0.041.
• 1.01, 1.03.
• 1.04, 1.05.

File prefixes

Many source files has prefixes.

Prefix	Possible description
gxl	Main framework
xxl	Extensions for the main framework
xau	Audio compression
xjp	Image compression
he	"Helium" library

Game menus

Menu classes	Description	Menu items
MenuView/iMainMenuDlg	Main menu screen	TRID_MENU_NEWGAME, TRID_MENU_LOADGAME, TRID_MENU_HIGHSCORE, TRID_MENU_CREDITS, TRID_MENU_EXITGAME
GameMenuDlg/iGameMenuDlg	Small menu dialog in the corner of the screen during the game	Settings, Save game, Main menu, Quit, Return to game

What we do

Port the existing sources to Kotlin. Use KorGE (available under Apache 2.0 license) to draw picture, process user input, and provide binaries for different platforms.

Progress

The progress can be seen under the Issues tab.

There are some screencasts of what's working:

• Progress bar.
• Main menu.
• Language selector and credits.

Practices

There are some practices of rewriting C++ code to JVM-related code.

Constant references

Many objects are passed to functions as constants. To archive this in Kotlin, it's needed to write an interface with constant (read-only) methods and another interface or class with other methods that extends/implements the constant interface. The interface should have the "I" prefix (from "Immutable"). You can find many examples in the ported sources.

Maybe Kotlin will have such a concept in the future: KT-44173.

Pointers

Some arguments are passed as pointers and are modified inside the function. For these purposes, just pass mutable object. If the type is immutable, for example, String or Int, we have a special wrapper called Mutable<T>. Find examples in the ported sources.

Remove super classes

• iIListNode.
• TypeAware.

Use standard Kotlin classes

Kotlin class	Initial type
String	_T("String content"), L"String content", LPCTSTR, iStringTemplate<E>, iStringW, iStringA, iStringT
Byte	sint8
UByte	uint8
Short	sint16
UShort	uint16
Int	sint32
UInt	uint32
Long	sint64
ULong	uint64

Code folding

IDEs such as IDEA or NetBeans can fold code. It's useful to hide huge pieces of code by default:

//<editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="hashCode & equals">
custom hashCode and equals methods here
//</editor-fold>

Other links

• Pocket Heroes aka Palm Heroes history — http://wiki.ioupg.com/doku.php/ioupgteam:pocket_heroes. Has some info about the game resources compression. Interesting in general ;)
• Group with fans of Palm Kingdoms, the descendant game — https://vk.com/palmkingdoms.
• Previous repo of this porting effort — https://github.com/anonymous-frog-studio/new-ph-legacy — obsolete and archived.

License

This work is available under Apache 2.0 license.