Re: Sorting out the Quake2 situation
Hi,
On Sun, 15 Nov 2009 19:33:27 +0000, Julian Mehnle <julian@mehnle.net> wrote:
> I'm interested in getting Quake 2 packaged. I'm willing to work on this
> myself, however before I start doing that I'd like to gather any
> information and experiences that you Debian Games people have on the
> situation.
>
> My approach would be to take the latest R1Q2 revision and patch it up to
> compile under Debian i386 and amd64 (for starters) and to have ALSA
> sound. Then I'd look into how to add quake2 support to game-data-
> packager.
>
> Which parts would you do differently? What are the particular challenges
> that I don't know about? Generally, what are the reasons nobody has
> packaged it already, assuming it's not laziness? (Which would be
> perfectly fine; I'm not here to assign blame, but want to understand the
> situation.) And finally: who would be willing to help me with this
> endeavor?
I started working on this a while back, but never got past the sound
problems. I found http://quadaver.net/HowtoQuake2ClientLinux very useful to
get started, but you probably know what’s mentioned there anyway!
On the engine side, I built R1Q2 (version b7904) and AprQ2 (both 1.20 and
1.211) without any trouble on i386, even with gcc 4.3. Ideally we’d need both,
R1Q2 for multiplayer and AprQ2 for singleplayer (it supports cutscenes which
R1Q2 doesn’t); perhaps multiplayer support ought even to be stripped out from
AprQ2 to ensure there aren’t too many security issues... AprQ2 also has sound
problems, and the latest version has difficulties with saved games.
On the game side, obviously game-data-packager is the way to go; getting it
to package the baseq2 files from a Quake II CD or an existing installation
shouldn’t be too difficult.
Where things get interesting is if you try to include everything which was
possible with Icculus Quake II:
* ctf requires including bits from either the original GPL Quake II source
release or Icculus Quake II 0.16.1;
* rogue and xatrix aren’t redistributable, so the game library would have to
be built on the user’s machine when packaging the rest of the game files.
Count me in anyway, definitely for testing (I’ve got Quake II and the two
“official” mission packs), and possibly for packaging too.
Regards,
Stephen
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