Re: state of doom packaging: etch to lenny, plans for squeeze

[Stephen Kitt <lists@sk2.org>]

Hi Jon,

On Tue, 3 Mar 2009 22:34:23 +0000, Jon Dowland
<jon+debian-devel-games@alcopop.org> wrote:
>     I want to introduce a few more engines. On the cards are
>     chocolate-doom, prboom-plus and remood.

Wouldn't Legacy Doom and ZDoom be interesting to package too, now that the
Raven code has been GPLed? I know ReMooD is supposed to be able to replace
Legacy Doom (unless the fabled C++ rewrite ever finished), but I've found it
rather unstable. ZDoom might still be encumbered by its use of BUILD code
though, as I understand it.

I reckon it would be nice to be able to play most of the Cacowards maps with
engines packaged in Debian... What do you think?

>     I am interested in working on the packaging of quake
>     1/2/3 games in Debian. I think such games would benefit
>     from a similar set of guidelines for inter-operation
>     (virtual package names, file layouts, menu sections,
>     etc.). It might be worthwhile to follow the doom-package
>     evolution and evolve the doom packaging guidelines into
>     game packaging guidelines. This would definitely make
>     sense if we ended up packaging the guidelines.

I'd started looking at building Quake 1/2 packages, although I don't have
anything presentable yet. My ideas so far are:
* add support to game-data-packager for
  - base Quake 1
  - the Hipnotic and Rogue mission packs
  - base Quake II
  - the Rogue and Xatrix mission packs
* package fitzquake, perhaps once 0.85 is ported to SDL (since that version
removes most limits and supports Quoth directly)
* package tyrquake
* package darkplaces and tenebrae perhaps
* package r1q2
* package aprq2 (version 1.21.1 has problems with save-games, 1.20 works well
for me; I haven't tried jdolan's SVN yet)
* build a quake2-ctf package from the last icculus source (0.16.1), perhaps
use that as a base for quake2-rogue and quake2-xatrix too (altough that would
be a bit more complex given the corresponding licenses)

If we stick to packaging the base data, the engine dependency situation is
simpler than Doom's. The only gotchas are handling updates (if we support
installation from the original CDs) and perhaps promoting aprq2 as the better
single-player Quake II engine since r1q2 doesn't support cinematics.

If we add support for some of the popular extensions (Nehahra and Quoth for
example) the situation becomes a bit more involved, but if we follow the
doom-engine/boom-engine idea there shouldn't be too much trouble.

Are there any nice Linux-compatible Quake 1/2 launchers?

This is all from a mostly single-player standpoint; that's what I'm
interested in anyway!

Regards,

Stephen