packaging vcmi
Hi,
I recently opened this ITP https://bugs.debian.org/741640 because I wanted to
get VCMI into Debian. The game has been suggested for inclusion here
https://wiki.debian.org/Games/Suggested#VCMI and became much more interesting
recently with campaign support.
I'm not a DD so I will need a sponsor for vcmi. It would be nice if I could
join the pkg-games team and maintain vcmi in git on alioth. You can see my
first attempts of packaging it here:
http://mentors.debian.net/package/vcmi
Upstream ships their own ./debian directory because they maintain a ubuntu ppa:
https://launchpad.net/~saven-ivan/+archive/vcmi I solved that problem with a
Files-Excluded directive in debian/copyright.
My packaging is based on theirs but does some cleanup and fixes a couple of
lintian problems. I reported some of the remaining problems (spelling, man
pages and missing key in *.desktop files) to upstream and they will be fixed in
the next upstream version. The current packaging carries a patch to make it use
avconv instead of ffmpeg but upstream will include functionality that can
handle both systems in the next release, so the patch can be dropped then.
I so far failed to solve the lintian hardening warnings. I can't figure out why
the vcmiclient binary does not generate them while other binaries which are
built by cmake in the exact same way do.
The game needs bitmaps, animations, texts, sounds and videos from the original
game (though sounds and videos are optional). There exists a big modding
community for vcmi but the programs that are so far used by artists were
created many years ago, only run on windows (some work under wine) and do not
come with any source code. Therefore, I created some python code which can
unpack the game files into commonly editable formats (png and json) and repack
them into the proprietary formats.
Here is the code and two videos demonstrating the successful unpacking,
modification and repacking of all graphical elements:
https://github.com/josch/lodextract
https://mister-muffin.de/p/kpyL.ogg
https://mister-muffin.de/p/hSF6.ogg
The first video shows all graphics replaced by colored rectangles. Such a
graphics set would probably be free (only the width and height of the original
artwork remain) but unplayable. The second video shows all colors other than
transparency replaced by a solid color. This allows to differentiate between
different objects because their shape remains but this kind of derivative work
is most likely as non-free as the original graphics (though it shows that the
packing code works correctly). The colored rectangle version could be the basis
of a free graphics pack. Creating such a replacement is surely a multi-year
effort and might never happen but it made me more motivated to package vcmi for
Debian if there was a DFSG compatible way to replace the proprietary assets
with free ones. I'm not sure yet where to put the unpacking and repacking
scripts. Maybe they can be integrated upstream (they have the same license).
cheers, josch
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