Re: RFS: quakespasm (2nd try)

[David Banks <amoebae@gmail.com>]

Hi Simon,

On 4 April 2011 11:38, Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> wrote:
> Should this be contrib/games? It's relatively useless without Quake data,
> unless there's an equivalent of FreeDoom/OpenArena for Quake 1 (in which
> case we should package it, in main if it's DFSG-compliant or in non-free
> if it's "free beer").
...
> README.Debian:
>> There is lots of free beer content available on the above site also.
>
> Is any of it good enough to package, and complete enough to not need any idQ1
> files?
>
> http://bugs.debian.org/508201 suggests that ezquake provides models and
> graphics but no maps.
>
> Is http://sourceforge.net/projects/openquartz/ complete enough to be used as
> an equivalent of OpenArena?

I see the rationale for putting it in contrib and I am happy to
retarget it there.  However obviously I would prefer for it to go to
main.

Openquartz: Seems pretty useless for single player, but works nice for
multiplayer.  Should work with bot mods as well, I just tried it with
Frikbot and no problems.  I am mostly interested in the single player
game so it would not interest me personally, but there is still a
quite active multiplayer community.  See the forum on quakeone.com.

The content on Func_Msgboard is definitely good enough to package, but
it won't be very useful with Openquartz's lack of single player
support, though there are DM maps there.  Most of them would have to
go to non-free, a few could go to contrib.  But I think it's not
really worth packaging these, most players are comfortable installing
their own maps and probably prefer it.

> README.Debian:
>> If this is too much to type every time I suggest to make a small shell script
>> containing that command and install it as '/usr/local/bin/quake' or similar.
>
> I think a good-quality Debian package should have a launcher script that
> "Just Works" - see quake3, for instance. In this case it may need to be a
> separate (source) package due to non-free/non-distributable dependencies.
>
> If there are alternative datasets, it'd be good to have an arrangement similar
> to how the ioquake3 family work: there, openarena and quake3 are the
> user-visible packages containing shell scripts and menu entries, with ioquake3
> (the engine), openarena-data and quake3-data as implementation details.

I would also prefer a command that works straight away.  I will take a
look at the implementation of the quake 3 packages.  I have the game
somewhere...

> How does this engine compare with darkplaces (RFP, #319599)? Are we going to
> want an "any dataset with any engine" arrangement with a mini-policy, like
> Jon has set up for Doom?

That sounds nice.  I was also thinking of packaging proquake, which is
a nice engine for deathmatch.  The package distributed by upstream
looks a little hairy though.

> Note that we already have Nexuiz, which I believe uses a modified darkplaces
> engine - I'm not sure whether it's a fork (like Tremulous is a fork of Q3),
> or close enough to share an engine (like OA and Q3).

I thought that Nexuiz can indeed play Q1 data, and the way I read the
bug seems to support that.

Thanks for your review, Simon!

Cheers,
-- 
David Banks  <amoebae@gmail.com>