AC on the Raspberry PI

[stef]

I've been trying to figure out if it would be possible to get Assault Cube to run on a Raspberry PI recently, and while I'm certain its technically possible I'm not sure about a couple of factors that would determine how easy it would be, so I decided to ask for some help here.

Install Raspbian, install the required libraries and tools. Compile. Fix any bugs you encounter. That easy. However, you will end up with a game running on software-emulated Open GL. Too slow to use.

First off, I haven't been able to find a version of AC for anything other than x86 architecture,

Look again. AC is also running on AMD64 and PowerPC.

How... 'separate' are AC and the Cube engine it uses? Is the difference between Cube and AC basically a few changed config files, a few different maps, and some new weapon models? Or is it more complicated than that?

Much more complicated. Also - you want to port software but you can't handle diff?

Secondly, this I'm also not sure about, I've read that some of AC's assets are "non-free". Does this mean I can't distribute them? Ideally if I/someone else got AC to work on the PI, it'd be put up on the PI Store(for free) so that its easy for people to get and play it. Would the "non-free" assets make this impossible?

http://assault.cubers.net/docs/license.html
You can't redistribute a modified package. Instead, distribute just the binary for the new platform. People can add the zip file with the media files themselves. AC documentation calls this a "binary mod" and it is highly encouraged.

And finally, how large are the differences between the versions of the Cube engine for different operating systems? The most popular OS for the PI is Raspbian, which is based off of Linux. But as far as I can tell, Cube has never been ported to Android, which is extremely similar and based off of Linux, and is ideally the version you'd want to use when creating a port for the PI. Using the x86 Linux version means that it'd have to be ported to OpenGL ES, so it'd be easier to start with a version that is already running on GL ES and work from there.

Again, diff is your friend.
AC doesn't care much about the OS. It's all about the libraries. If your target only has GL ES, you have to port AC to that.
Android is probably not the easiest target. I'd guess, that AC is a bit out of the scope of the NDK, so you'd have to port AC to java. Good luck with that. (Although, there's a NDK-port of enet on github, and it's only four years old...)