[Proof of concept] Run mobile Forge full-screen on PC
Posted: 22 Dec 2016, 18:45
Last Updated: Aug 14, 2017
Hi guys!
Recently I've been experimenting with making the "forge-gui-mobile-dev" project somewhat more useful for practical purposes. In particular, I disabled the window resizing since that caused nearly irreparable visual glitches until you restarted the game. More interestingly, I added a couple additional options to the configuration of this project (see the relevant Main.java) which basically allows it to operate as a full-screen desktop application, effectively serving as a form of a "back-port" of the mobile Forge app to PC (the forge-gui-mobile-dev project uses the Lwjgl wrapper for libgdx, which is available in native form for 32-bit and 64-bit Linux, Mac and Windows).
Because of this interesting and somewhat nice side effect, it's now possible to launch Forge with the mobile app interface on PC. While not necessarily fully convenient (since the program was written with a cellphone/tablet touch interface in mind), it can be quite handy to experiment with the tablet interface and to test it in a screen that is bigger than a door peephole on modern monitors, and it can even be used to play Planar Conquest on PC (for those of you without Android devices ).
In the bottom of this post you will find an archive with the snapshot compiled this way and ready for running on your PC without any additional dependencies. Please note that this is not an official Forge beta release and it is unsupported, you can try using it at your own risk but Forge developers can't provide any support for it whatsoever if things go wrong or don't work for you.
Note that this is just a straightforward launcher/wrapper for mobile Forge. Nothing has been changed in the original mobile Forge, so the interface has a few caveats when used on a standard PC with a keyboard and a mouse:
- The following keyboard buttons work in this game: Space (or Enter) is used for the action that is on the bottom left side on the battlefield (keep hand, OK to move to the next phase, auto mana payment etc.), and Esc is used for the action that is on the bottom right side of the battlefield (skip turn, alpha strike/call back, mulligan etc.). E can be used for an explicit end of turn, and A for alpha strike. Ctrl+C concedes the match.
- To quit the game, either press Alt-F4 (which quits without confirmation) or use Esc in the main menu (which quits with confirmation).
- Left-clicking a mouse is the same as touching the tablet screen with a finger, so it's used for pretty much all actions (tapping cards, selecting things in menus, confirming actions etc.).
- To zoom in on the cards, hold LMB over the card for approximately a second (which is essentially the same as tap-holding it with a finger on a tablet or a cellphone).
- Changing the size of the cards in deck editors can be achieved via the mouse scroll wheel while holding Ctrl.
- Whenever the game asks you to "swipe" things, you can LMB-drag in the given direction (hold the left mouse button and drag) to swipe. Not very convenient, but it works.
If anyone has a touch-enabled monitor or laptop, I'm actually curious to know how well this operates with it (I'm assuming that it should work quite well with an actual touch device).
The following issues are also known and I'm currently not sure how to resolve them:
- The game was only tested in three different resolutions: 1920x1080, 1366x768 and 1680x1050. It will most likely work well with any 16:10 or 16:9 resolution, but it may fail to work on some of them or on some other aspect ratios (some issues in certain 4:3 modes were reported, but some 4:3 modes were reported to work well, such as 800x600). The game is rather picky about how things are placed according to the aspect ratio that is used, so if the game screen is garbled for you, probably the game does not like your display resolution for one reason or another. Please switch to another resolution (preferably with the 16:10 or 16:9 ratio) if at all possible. Alternatively you can create the file "screen_resolution.ini" in your game folder (the same where the .jar file resides) and specify the desired resolution inside in the WxHxFS format, where FS is either "1" for fullscreen or 0 for windowed (e.g. 1920x1080x1 will run the game in 1920x1080 full screen, and 1280x800x0 will run the game in 1280x800 windowed). Then the game will try to switch the monitor to that resolution when launched.
- You can set the game to use the same card pictures and stuff as your desktop Forge uses. For that you can either try using the folder selector in Forge preferences or, if that fails (for some reason it crashed on the Windows 10 system when my friend tried it and I haven't yet investigated that), just hand-edit forge.profile.preferences in the game folder and set the cacheDir parameter manually.
Also, note the following:
- The game was only tested on Linux Mint 18.2, Windows 10, and macOS, but it should work on any other recent Linux distro or any other recent version of Windows. Feedback is welcome as to whether this worked on your system or not (please include your OS and your monitor resolution for information).
To run this game:
If you have a system that understands Bash scripts (Linux, BSD, Windows 10 which now has bash, probably macOS), you can try running the forge-mobile.sh file and see if that works for you.
If that doesn't work for you or your system doesn't understand Bash, you can use this command to run the game manually (you can create a .cmd file on Windows with the following contents if you're using, for example, Windows 7 or 8/8.1):
java -Xmx1024m -jar forge-mobile.jar
If .jar files are associated with Java on your system, double-clicking forge-mobile.jar should probably work too.
Good luck if you'd like to tinker with this hack
Remember that it's purely experimental though!
DOWNLOAD LINK: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ymfy0978mimsq ... ar.gz?dl=0
- Agetian
Hi guys!
Recently I've been experimenting with making the "forge-gui-mobile-dev" project somewhat more useful for practical purposes. In particular, I disabled the window resizing since that caused nearly irreparable visual glitches until you restarted the game. More interestingly, I added a couple additional options to the configuration of this project (see the relevant Main.java) which basically allows it to operate as a full-screen desktop application, effectively serving as a form of a "back-port" of the mobile Forge app to PC (the forge-gui-mobile-dev project uses the Lwjgl wrapper for libgdx, which is available in native form for 32-bit and 64-bit Linux, Mac and Windows).
Because of this interesting and somewhat nice side effect, it's now possible to launch Forge with the mobile app interface on PC. While not necessarily fully convenient (since the program was written with a cellphone/tablet touch interface in mind), it can be quite handy to experiment with the tablet interface and to test it in a screen that is bigger than a door peephole on modern monitors, and it can even be used to play Planar Conquest on PC (for those of you without Android devices ).
In the bottom of this post you will find an archive with the snapshot compiled this way and ready for running on your PC without any additional dependencies. Please note that this is not an official Forge beta release and it is unsupported, you can try using it at your own risk but Forge developers can't provide any support for it whatsoever if things go wrong or don't work for you.
Note that this is just a straightforward launcher/wrapper for mobile Forge. Nothing has been changed in the original mobile Forge, so the interface has a few caveats when used on a standard PC with a keyboard and a mouse:
- The following keyboard buttons work in this game: Space (or Enter) is used for the action that is on the bottom left side on the battlefield (keep hand, OK to move to the next phase, auto mana payment etc.), and Esc is used for the action that is on the bottom right side of the battlefield (skip turn, alpha strike/call back, mulligan etc.). E can be used for an explicit end of turn, and A for alpha strike. Ctrl+C concedes the match.
- To quit the game, either press Alt-F4 (which quits without confirmation) or use Esc in the main menu (which quits with confirmation).
- Left-clicking a mouse is the same as touching the tablet screen with a finger, so it's used for pretty much all actions (tapping cards, selecting things in menus, confirming actions etc.).
- To zoom in on the cards, hold LMB over the card for approximately a second (which is essentially the same as tap-holding it with a finger on a tablet or a cellphone).
- Changing the size of the cards in deck editors can be achieved via the mouse scroll wheel while holding Ctrl.
- Whenever the game asks you to "swipe" things, you can LMB-drag in the given direction (hold the left mouse button and drag) to swipe. Not very convenient, but it works.
If anyone has a touch-enabled monitor or laptop, I'm actually curious to know how well this operates with it (I'm assuming that it should work quite well with an actual touch device).
The following issues are also known and I'm currently not sure how to resolve them:
- The game was only tested in three different resolutions: 1920x1080, 1366x768 and 1680x1050. It will most likely work well with any 16:10 or 16:9 resolution, but it may fail to work on some of them or on some other aspect ratios (some issues in certain 4:3 modes were reported, but some 4:3 modes were reported to work well, such as 800x600). The game is rather picky about how things are placed according to the aspect ratio that is used, so if the game screen is garbled for you, probably the game does not like your display resolution for one reason or another. Please switch to another resolution (preferably with the 16:10 or 16:9 ratio) if at all possible. Alternatively you can create the file "screen_resolution.ini" in your game folder (the same where the .jar file resides) and specify the desired resolution inside in the WxHxFS format, where FS is either "1" for fullscreen or 0 for windowed (e.g. 1920x1080x1 will run the game in 1920x1080 full screen, and 1280x800x0 will run the game in 1280x800 windowed). Then the game will try to switch the monitor to that resolution when launched.
- You can set the game to use the same card pictures and stuff as your desktop Forge uses. For that you can either try using the folder selector in Forge preferences or, if that fails (for some reason it crashed on the Windows 10 system when my friend tried it and I haven't yet investigated that), just hand-edit forge.profile.preferences in the game folder and set the cacheDir parameter manually.
Also, note the following:
- The game was only tested on Linux Mint 18.2, Windows 10, and macOS, but it should work on any other recent Linux distro or any other recent version of Windows. Feedback is welcome as to whether this worked on your system or not (please include your OS and your monitor resolution for information).
To run this game:
If you have a system that understands Bash scripts (Linux, BSD, Windows 10 which now has bash, probably macOS), you can try running the forge-mobile.sh file and see if that works for you.
If that doesn't work for you or your system doesn't understand Bash, you can use this command to run the game manually (you can create a .cmd file on Windows with the following contents if you're using, for example, Windows 7 or 8/8.1):
java -Xmx1024m -jar forge-mobile.jar
If .jar files are associated with Java on your system, double-clicking forge-mobile.jar should probably work too.
Good luck if you'd like to tinker with this hack
Remember that it's purely experimental though!
DOWNLOAD LINK: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ymfy0978mimsq ... ar.gz?dl=0
- Agetian