Re: Tux Racer 0.10 Released

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Mads Bondo Dydensborg wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 19 Mar 2000, Erik Thiele wrote:
> 
> > and i also think many people don't manage to compile
> > and don't tell you....
> > yes i think this is a important point.
> 
> Amen. Tux AQFH and the "lemmings like" tux whatever...

Pingus.

> ...is two projects I have
> yet to figure out how to compile. At some points I have spend most of a
> day trying to get them to work, and have finally given up. And, as you
> state it always seems to be the support libraries that are the problem.

GRRRRRRRR.

But if you don't tell anyone, it'll never get any better.  I would never
spend as long as even an hour trying to get a game to compile.  Collect up
the error messages and post them to the appropriate mailing list...unless
it's really an obvious problem with something you've mis-installed somewhere
else.

I take pride in the fact that every single person who has emailed
the Tux_AQFH list asking for help with compiling has gone away with
a working game (at least if their hardware can support it)...even people
trying to get it to work on Mac's, Alpha's, MIPS and other more obscure
Linux ports.

In pretty much every case, compilation fails because of a mis-configured
Linux box - but when it's not, I get the chance to fix things so that life
gradually gets easier.

> I have similar problems with getting "Tuxracer" going - it segfaults when
> glut wants to initialise. (This is 0.11.1 - no version so far has worked
> for me). OTOH XRacer worked out of the box from version 0.11 or something.
> 
> Of course it is - for me - a matter of time and _someday_ I _am_ going to
> get it to work, but you loose some people in the proces, when they have to
> collect 13 different pieces and use days to set up support libraries to
> get it to work.

Well, that's hard to fix.

If you want 3D graphics, you pretty much have to depend on Mesa and either
GLUT or FLTK or something...that in turn means you may depend on GLIDE and/or
some Xfree version or other.  Tux_AQFH also depends on PLIB - but that's all.
Apart from the underlying infrastructure that I can do nothing about, I depend
on a single additional piece...that's not unreasonable IMHO.

Gradually, Linux distro's are bundling PLIB with their CD's - so if (for
example) you install SuSE Linux and ask for Tux_AQFH to be installed, PLIB
gets put on your machine automagically.

I don't produce RPM's and such because it's a LOT of trouble to do so - and
the Linux distro guys are good at that.  Since they make profit from doing
this, I don't feel any compunction at letting them do the work.

At any rate, if your system has Mesa and GLUT correctly installed, PLIB and
Tux install *VERY* easily with a standard set of './configure ; make install'
commands that are really no harder than installing an RPM.

If Mesa and GLUT are NOT correctly installed then you are screwed with or
without RPM's.

One thing that's going to help a LOT is the new standard "The OpenGL ABI
for Linux":

  http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/ABI/

> And, BTW, my daytime job involves writing linux kernel drivers. Not that
> it qualifies me to anything, but I think I should know how to compile...

Well, tell me what went wrong - without that information, I'm powerless
to help (or even know that something went wrong for that matter).  The
statement that "I couldn't get it to compile" contains virtually zero
information.

Read this:

  http://freshmeat.net/news/2000/02/26/951627540.html

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1@airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker@hti.com      (work)

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