I'm willing to take over the Ubuntu Spring packages

[YokoZar]

As of about two weeks ago, I've started playing Spring. I became aware of it after seeing a story on Digg about great Linux games.

Eventually, I found my way to the Something Awful forums Spring thread, which in turn had a link to this Spring thread: spring.clan-sy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=8247

The instructions there are a bit complicated, but I'd like to bring Spring to the Ubuntu masses.

Who I am:
If you're an Ubuntu Wine user, then you've almost surely used my packages: winehq.org/site/download-deb

I've been maintaining the Wine packages for a couple of years now, but I'm ready to start expanding into other areas. Spring seems like coolest thing to start contributing to, and I'd like to help.

Working with Wine has given me not only a ton of experience hacking .deb packages, but also running an APT repository (see link).

Why the package needs maintenance:
Aside from the new version of Spring due out "soon", the Spring package could use some general touchups. For instance:

• There is no spring-maps package with all the commonly played maps
• There is no spring-mods package with the most recent versions of commonly played mods
• There is no spring-AI package with newer, usable Linux AI - Linux users are essentially forced into multiplayer or compiling AI from source at this point.
• There is no lobby client in the Linux package (run through Wine or otherwise)

All of these things could benefit from not only being used, but also being kept up to date with the latest package. The magic of apt-get is that we can keep users updated to the latest version of a package when they add our repository - keeping Spring up to date can literally be easier than updating it on Windows.


Regardless, I'm here, and I'd like to help. Is this a good place to focus effort? What's the next step?


Links had front part removed due to the spam thingy for new users...

[Acidd_UK]

Sounds great, hopefully one of the devs will have a chat with you soon

[imbaczek]

Aside from the new version of Spring due out "soon"

omigawd prophet ^^

wrt packages - the sooner, the better. there are content issues, though - not all is gpl/cc/otherwise free as in speech (and beer, too.) unfortunately, this also concern the most popular mods - OTA spinoffs - and the most highly developed ones - Gundam and EE. Kernel Panic is your best bet as a prepackaged mod as for now.

There's also AI issues - one of the best AIs (if not the best at the moment), NTAI, is not free (AF, correct me if I'm wrong.)

[Relative]

You should talk to tobi, he is currently maintaining these .debs and will likely appreciate help with the issues you pointed out:

http://spring.clan-sy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=9073

Although as of today these are out of date. Also, there is currently a java lobby in development to provide a native solution for linux.

http://spring.clan-sy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=8691

Thanks for participating! I doubt there is an ubuntu user that hasn't used your packages.

[kujeger]

Eventually, I found my way to the Something Awful forums Spring thread, which in turn had a link to this Spring thread: spring.clan-sy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=8247

Those instructions are all a bit outdated now, though.

Anyway, won't it be kind of troublesome to make a package that includes the most popular mods seeing as they all use original TA content? While most people ignore that and redistribute it anyway, having an official Ubuntu package doing something that blatantly illegal is probably not a good move.

[Relative]

I wish Atari would just abandon TA, its a useless IP for them.

[kujeger]

I wish Atari would just abandon TA, its a useless IP for them.

Even if they did they'd have to explicitly release all the TA stuff to the public domain or some very permissive license.

[Tobi]

Ah that's great

So I can finally take an evening off tomorrow?

I have been working together with the debian games team a bit, the debian/ dir I used (and plan to use) for 0.74b3/0.75b1 packages is in the debian games team SVN.

Btw, I don't think maps and mod packages are really useful because of the amount of data. There's over 10G of maps and mods stored on unknown files after all. Better integration wrt downloading maps/mods, setting up lobbies, etc, would be more valuable I think. But if you make the packages it's up to you of course

Ah good next step could be updating and compiling debs for 0.75 release, I can supply the hosting if you want

[Tim Blokdijk]

To add to Tobi's post:
The content side is still a bit of a problem with Spring. You have the legal aspect although we have enough "open" content now to make a playable game. Things like map "source" files are also quite a challenge as they can be quite large and in a PhotoShop format for example.

[YokoZar]

If we're going to have our own third party APT repository (similar to the Wine packages at wine.budgetdedicated.com), then we can put whatever we want there even if it can't go into Ubuntu universe for license reasons.

Who knows, though, maybe it'll be good for multiverse.

I'm going to see if I can update the current source package that's available for the new version today, that shouldn't be too hard since I do it every two weeks for Wine.

[YokoZar]

To add to Tobi's post:
The content side is still a bit of a problem with Spring. You have the legal aspect although we have enough "open" content now to make a playable game. Things like map "source" files are also quite a challenge as they can be quite large and in a PhotoShop format for example.

I'm (pretty) sure that map source files don't need to be included to comply with the GPL.

Regardless, the end user won't generally be downloading the source package anyway, especially for the maps package.

[longhair]

Personally, I like the idea of having at least a dozen or so of the more popular maps in a package. Of course, you'd have a lot to choose from.

Would there be any way to package the current Windows lobby to work with WINE? There's a hack to get it to work on Linux and get it to open the Linux version of Spring, but it's a bit of hacking to get it setup properly.

An AMD 64 version would be great too!

[det]

Speaking of wine, today I found that wine 0.9.41 breaks TASClient.exe (0.9.40 worked).

[YokoZar]

Speaking of wine, today I found that wine 0.9.41 breaks TASClient.exe (0.9.40 worked).

Yes, this is a regression in Wine:

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8948

[YokoZar]

On another note, the TASpring client should not be explicitly checking for Wine - see: http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-1e75a6f ... 4a7832b4f0

How can I detect Wine?

Unless you are Microsoft trying to prevent your application from working, you really shouldn't want to do this. If there's a quirk in Wine you need to work around, it's much better to fix it in Wine. More importantly, we might soon fix it ourselves, and then your code will be mysteriously and permanently broken.

That said, there is nothing wrong with detecting Wine for survey purposes. Many developers are surprised to learn that a substantial portion of their userbase has been running their program via Wine; sometimes developers aren't even aware that this is possible. For the best way to do this, consult the wine-devel mailing list.

Anyway, after a couple hours of hacking I think I've managed to get the new version packaged up properly - it's compiling now, and along the way I found a rather nasty bug in the Spring scons script.

[YokoZar]

Ok, the packages are done, tested, and seem to be working. Right now they're basically equivalent to the old version packages, except with newer build dependencies.

I put them up here: http://tuzakey.com/~scott/spring/

This is not a permanent place to host them, however - they'll need to be moved to the APT repository where the current packages are.

You can use the same trick as before, with the windows lobby via Wine and replacing the spring.exe with the modified one. I managed to play a couple of games before the server kept dropping everyone continuously.

[Relative]

Thanks, it works perfectly.

[CautionToTheWind]

Speaking of wine, today I found that wine 0.9.41 breaks TASClient.exe (0.9.40 worked).

Yes, this is a regression in Wine:

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8948

Hello YokoZar and thank you for your contribution. I too use your wine packages, and since there's a new spring and you're here and all, i must ask: when can we expect a wine update that fixes the taspring windows lobby?

Best regards.

[Relative]

You can use Aflobby, its stable and very usable as a multiplayer lobby client.

[clericvash]

Thanks for the packages, downloading now and testing.