Bug#788061: Bug#788057: game-data-packager: please add support for Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold and Planet Strike

[Alexandre Detiste]

2015-06-30 11:19 GMT+02:00 Braden Obrzut <admin at maniacsvault.net>:
>> Is this the right way to call it ?
>> "cd /usr/share/games/super-3d-noahs-ark/ ; ecwolf --file noah3d.wad"
>
> More or less. "ecwolf --file /usr/share/games/super-3d-noahs-ark/noah3d.wad"
> might be preferable if you allow users to add arguments of their own so the
> working directory doesn't magically change, but either way would work.

only one way work here, maybe I need to update ?

ReadConfig: Reading the Configuration.
IWad: Selecting base game data.
Can not find base game data. (*.wl6, *.wl1, *.sdm, *.sod)

-----

goal is to provide a .desktop file that simply launch the game
with standard parameters; if users know better, they can call
ecwolf by hand with custom parameters.
(or edit the .desktop file)

> The next version of ECWolf will have a way to autoload the wad through the
> config, although I'm starting to consider adding support for auto detection
> and loading it since you're not the first person to have asked.

This .desktop file should work out-of-the-box for all users;
without having to manually edit config files.

This could of course also be handled by a wrapper script
in our generated .deb that creates the config file
before first run or by patching the engine in the Debian package.

(use case 1: a computer with 3 users-id,
parent has a credit card & Steam account,
buy the game and then install it with game-data-packager
so that child1 & child2 can play it, without having a Steam account
in their unix account

use case 2: game is bought on a x86 computer running Steam,
but end up being played on an RaspberryPi or some other arm device)

>> Could ecwolf be symlinked as /usr/games/s3dna and automaticaly
>> start in S3DNA mode when called this way + autodetect noah3d.wad
>> the same ways Doom engines chex.deh for example ?
>
> No.  The noah3d binary uses a slightly modified version of ECWolf which can
> be found here: https://bitbucket.org/Blzut3/super-3d-noahs-ark  One of the
> modifications made there is the autoloading of that wad.

Fabian: I guess we don't want to package 2 engines that are 99%
the same thing in Debian.

>> Is this file only available via Steam or is it available on a plain
>> website ?
>
> It's also available in deb packages distributed on itch.io (as well as the
> Windows msi's, Mac dmg, and Android apk, but I'm sure those are less
> preferable).

Ok, I'll have a look at those.

> The alternate version of it is in the S3DNA repo:
> https://bitbucket.org/Blzut3/super-3d-noahs-ark/src/Noah1.3/wadsrc/noah3d.wad

> You'll probably want to use it anyway since from what Fabian tells me,
> Debian won't use my forked SDL_mixer for
> ECWolf ( https://bitbucket.org/Blzut3/sdl_mixer-for-ecwolf ), so not using
> OPL music will break some of the game sounds (can't run the OPL or PC
> Speaker emulators and play sampled/MIDI music at the same time with standard
> SDL mixer).

Well, I don't know the whole story, but if there really is something
broken in SDL_mixer, I'd rather have it fixed upstream for all games.

---

By the way:

We are trying to also support Blake Stone, but I couldn't identify all
the old versions.

In "patchutil" you use CRC32, to identify files, while we use MD5;
could you provide us the MD5 for the old versions ?

This can be in any very rough format, I'll do the editing.
(for wolf3d we should already have all versions)

http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-games/game-data-packager.git/tree/data/blakestone.yaml

https://bitbucket.org/Blzut3/ecwolf/src/eeac477f694f572b2ad8bc2131d042e8fdca361e/tools/patchutil/main.cpp?at=default

Alexandre