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Re: Include 0AD, a new fancy 3D RTS



Bertrand Marc wrote:
The thing is the game needs to compile a few build-deps itself :
- a specific version of spidermonkey
- a library called fcollada
- premake

Note that the game requires an obsolete version of Premake with lots of custom patches - a standard version will fail to work.

(Ideally the game would upgrade to a recent Premake (and send any still-necessary patches upstream), or switch to something like CMake, but that's likely to take a fair amount of effort and introduce lots of new portability bugs that have been squeezed out of the current system, so we haven't been rushing to do that.)


Also we require FCollada with custom patches, to fix some crashes when loading certain files, and to fix some memory corruption bugs. So I wouldn't suggest replacing it with a random version of FCollada from somewhere else, or using our version of it for any other project.

The problem here is there's no upstream for FCollada any more (the developers decided to focus on their commercial work instead), and other projects seem to all use their own forks of it. Maybe what we should do is set up a new fork as a standalone project (i.e. create a new unofficial upstream), give it a proper build system, import the patches from our game and from elsewhere and keep it actively maintained, and then distros can package that version and other applications can hopefully share it. (http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/562 is related to this.)


For SpiderMonkey, we don't need custom patches, but older versions will have thread-safety bugs (the API guarantees were changed) and newer versions have incompatible APIs. The SpiderMonkey developers aren't interested in doing stable releases, and it's a core piece of our game engine so we rely on lots of its minor details for correctness and performance. Also there's a good chance of multiplayer out-of-sync errors when players have different versions of SpiderMonkey.

Since the game is tightly tied to a specific version, I don't know what options would work better than the current approach of bundling the required version.


On a related note: We're probably going to add the NVIDIA Texture Tools (http://code.google.com/p/nvidia-texture-tools/) as a dependency in the next week or so. But I don't think we need any special versions or patches, so a normal package should work and hopefully it won't be a problem. (Since most (all?) distros don't have packages for it yet, I'd still like to bundle it by default, so people won't have to waste time downloading and installing it themselves; but I'll add a flag to use the non-bundled library, for people who have a packaged version.)

--
Philip Taylor
excors@gmail.com


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