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Porting Colossal Cave Adventure to Native Client

Native Client (NaCl) is a new technology built in to Chrome that allows native code (read C++) to be compiled into a form that is then executed within the browser. Several impressive ports have already been completed, including ScummVM, OGRE, and Unity 3D. A host of other open source libraries have also been ported and are available in the naclports repository.

I am really excited about what this could mean for the future of the web as a platform for technology; even old crusty low-level coders like me can get in on this internet thing all the young people are talking about. I had the opportunity recently to take part in a hackathon centred around Native Client and took the opportunity to port a game that should need no introduction: Colossal Cave Adventure.

For those who just want to try it out, you’ll need Chrome 14 as a minimum and you can find it in the Chrome web store right here. If you just want to see the source, which is open of course, you’ll find that here. Please understand that this was written over the course of a few hours so it is not necessarily as elegant a solution as it might be given more time. Perhaps I will return to it and clean it up later.

There were a number of hurdles I had to overcome to complete this port and it might be interesting to others so this post will cover the issues and my approaches to them.

There were three key components to getting the code to work under Native Client:

Static data

The problem

The original source contains a utility advent0 that takes the text messages from a set of .txt files and creates look-up tables that match a message with a byte offset. At run-time, these look-up tables are used to seek through the .txt files and read the message out using fseek and fread. This is not feasible under Native Client as this interface to file I/O is not (yet?) supported. Other ports have successfully used forms to allow users to upload files that are required, but that also is not applicable to this app.

The solution

A new utility was created (advtxt_to_c) that converts the .txt files into arrays of c-style strings. These are then statically linked into the executable so that instead of using byte offsets, the run-time can access the message array directly. This does increase the final executable size, but only by about 64kb. For reference, the total executable size is on the order of 4Mb, most of which is library code.

stdin/stdout

The problem

The original source obviously relies heavily on printf, fputc, etc to write to stdout. Under Native Client these will end up in the console logs rather than appearing on screen. Using fgets and scanf to get input from the user are equally incorrect.

The solution

The solution to this was to write a thin wrapper around any console output. At this point, I also split the output into three:

All of these functions call through to the Native Client module which then calls through to JavaScript methods.

Screen printing is used whenever the output should go to the, well, screen and in this case is appended to a textarea on the host HTML page. Console output is redirected to the JavaScript console where they can be read using the Developer Tools built in to Chrome, and error messages are added to a special span on the host HTML page that shows up red and fades over time. The game is also restarted whenever an error is produced, which is a far better approach than the original exit(-1).

Input from stdin was fixed by adding a method to the Native Client module that would call a callback when an ‘input’ message was passed from the JavaScript with a string parameter that comes from a text box on the HTML host page. This required some further changes as an synchronous call becomes an asynchronous call. See the next section for more on that.

Synchronous calls

The problem

As well as console output, the original source depended on fgets for reading user input. This is a synchronous call which has no analogue on the Native Client side. In fact, the whole game was originally written with an assumption that the game loop would block waiting for user input which, well, doesn’t work out all that well.

The solution

As mentioned above, fgets has been replaced by a call to the Native Client module that registers a callback to be called when the user submits text through the input control on the HTML page. The places that called fgets and assumed a synchronous return therefore had to be split into two functions. In some cases, they had to take in function pointers to call after the input had been received.

The main gameloop, that was essentially while (true) { turn(); }, has been replaced by a single call to the turn function that contains a single tick of the gameloop. When input is expected and received, a callback is called that once again calls the turn function.

Posted on 2011/09/20 by dominic in web | Tagged chrome, NaCl, Native Client | Leave a comment

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