linux .deb?

[clericvash]

Hey guys any chance of getting .deb file made for the linux port?

[Tobi]

some people are working on it

[clericvash]

Well i have tried checking the site that does it and only gentoo ebuilds are available

[Tobi]

some people are working on it

ie. they aren't finished yet...

[clericvash]

sorry for being stupid, any ideas as to when they might be available?

[Tobi]

not really, various people have been working on it lots of times and I've yet to see a working .deb

[clericvash]

well that sucks, because it never works under the current wine

[Tobi]

you can try installing it from source, see http://taspring.clan-sy.com/wiki/SetupGuide

Note tho that windows vs linux is impossible right now; also there is no functional lobby on linux, so playing online is not possible.

[fbo]

Hi,

I'm a bit new to spring but I managed to create some Debian packages (sarge and sid) of it. Unfortunately, I don't have any ftp server where I could put them - and my 384kBit/s DSL-uplink is too precious to serve 400MB of deb files. If anyone knows a usable ftp (better: rsync) site, I'll happily share the packages with the public.

However I'd need some help understanding some details of spring in general and of the linux version:

1. How do I select a mod and where does spring expect mod files (7z archives, right?) to be?

2. Where do I have to put unit files (ufo) to use them?

3. A bit more general: Is there a document describing, which type of file has to reside in which directory/subdirectory and why?

Best,

Frank

[Tobi]

Hi,

I'm a bit new to spring but I managed to create some Debian packages (sarge and sid) of it. Unfortunately, I don't have any ftp server where I could put them - and my 384kBit/s DSL-uplink is too precious to serve 400MB of deb files. If anyone knows a usable ftp (better: rsync) site, I'll happily share the packages with the public.

However I'd need some help understanding some details of spring in general and of the linux version:

1. How do I select a mod and where does spring expect mod files (7z archives, right?) to be?

Normally selecting mod is done in the lobby client before hosting a battle. Because a proper lobby is till missing, mod selecting is somewhat harder on linux. For simple single player, one can put the name of the .sdz or .sd7 file in ~/.springrc, e.g. 'ModFile=xtape.sd7'. The other way is to make a custom startscript, but I won't go into detail about them now. If you want I can paste an example.

The mod files go in the 'mods' subdirectory of the data directory.

The data directory to chdir to is determined by the following things, in this order (first items override lower items):

1. 'SpringData=/path/to/data' variable declaration in ~/.springrc
2. SPRING_DATADIR environment variable
3. 'datadir=/path/to/data' option passed to 'scons configure'
4. 'prefix=/install/path' option passed to scons configure. The datadir is assumed to be at '$prefix/games/taspring' in this case.
5. the default datadir in the default prefix, ie. '/usr/local/games/taspring'

If it fails to chdir to the above specified directory spring will asume the current directory is the data directory.

2. Where do I have to put unit files (ufo) to use them?

AFAIK, ufo files are outdated and dangerous to use, esp. in multiplayer (even tho that's barely possible in linux). To answer your question anyway, I think they should be put in the root of the datadir.

3. A bit more general: Is there a document describing, which type of file has to reside in which directory/subdirectory and why?

No.

The basics is like I typed above, plus maps go in maps/ (the contents of all archives in here are mapped onto the spring virtual file system IIRC), pathing info in maps/paths/ (generated by spring), demos (generated by spring) in demos/, screenshots go in screenshots/, mods in mods/, base content in base/, group AI shared objects and data in aidll/, global AI shared objects and data in aidll/globalai.

I hope I didn't forget important stuff

[fbo]

Thanks for all the info, Tobi.

Normally selecting mod is done in the lobby client before hosting a battle.

Yeah, I read that. But I always want to look behind the scenes . Unfortunately mod selection doesn't seem to work at all. Example:
* I put "FF 1.16 Data.sdz" and "FF 1.16 S.sdz" into the mods -subdirectory to test the "Final Frontier" mod
* modinfo.tdf -files indicated that all dependencies are satisfied ( springcontent.sdz , otacontent.sdz, tatextures.sdz )
* I removed all other mods from the mods subdir (leaving xtape.sd7 there makes the game work but ignores the FF mod)

But spring complains:

Code: Select all

Warning: mod archive is missing?
ERROR: button9.wav
  Couldnt open wav file
Warning: Incorrect/Missing content:
  file Armor.txt not found

What can I do to make a mod != xta work?

[fbo]

Oops - i forgot one question. Tobi, you mentioned, that ufo files are deprecated. How are units handle in a better way? Which kind of files do I have to expect? where do I have to put them? Where can I find an example unit?

BTW: I made a wiki page about the packaging: http://fbo.no-ip.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Linux/DebSpring

Best,

Frank

[Tobi]

What can I do to make a mod != xta work?

You didn't set 'ModFile=blah.sdz' in ~/.springrc??
As far as I know, that should work. Only problem could be that some mods have problems because of invalid characters in their (internal) filenames, maybe even case sensitivity vs. case insensitivity (tho IIRC the spring VFS is case insensitive).
Guess it's about time to hack together a mod menu (like the map menu and the script menu) .

Oops - i forgot one question. Tobi, you mentioned, that ufo files are deprecated. How are units handle in a better way? Which kind of files do I have to expect? where do I have to put them? Where can I find an example unit?

Spring is, except maybe for testing, never player with separate additional units. The 'normal' way to mod it is to use mods , so imho you can just ignore .ufo files for now and just make sure mods work.

Edit:

btw, that wiki page seems useful. Maybe an idea to copy it over to the spring wiki?

Also, I see you plan to update it often. If you want and have some account I can automagically upload newly built packages to, I can set up pbuilder/debuild stuff on my buildbot server for spring to build weekly new packages for various debian and ubuntu distros. PM me if you're interested.

Edit 2:

I wonder how much sense it makes to build large map packs and .debs with mods in it. This because new maps are released (almost) daily and new (versions of) mods are also released pretty often, so it will be a hell to maintain. Also, the installation of a mod/map is a matter of putting the file in the right directory (possibly after extracting it if the downloaded file didn't end in .sdz or .sd7) - nothing more, nothing less.

[fbo]

You didn't set 'ModFile=blah.sdz' in ~/.springrc??

sort of. I didn't set the path right . Thank you.

Spring is, except maybe for testing, never player with separate additional units. The 'normal' way to mod it is to use mods Smile, so imho you can just ignore .ufo files for now and just make sure mods work.

Thanks for the clarification. I'll concentrate on mods now.

Also, I see you plan to update it often. If you want and have some account I can automagically upload newly built packages to, I can set up pbuilder/debuild stuff on my buildbot server for spring to build weekly new packages for various debian and ubuntu distros. PM me if you're interested.

I don't know what pbuilder/debuild is. My packages are just dh_make -created. It's no problem for me to make regular builds for sarge and sid. For ubuntu and co. I'd have to set up some new VMs for building. How does this pbuilder/debuild work?

I wonder how much sense it makes to build large map packs and .debs with mods in it.

I think pretty much. Those map packs are the basis for easy installation which is sometimes the difference between a user trying/using something or not. I'm going to add an option to add mods/maps that are not part of debian packages. Nevertheless, my primary interest is to provide the "1. apt-get, 2. it works" experience.

Currently there's a dialog-menu shown for mod-, map- and unit-selection. I'l try to make that menu X-based (maybe kdialog?). The settings made in the menus are used to create per user/per host/per display spring-directories consisting of a symlink-tree to all the base data/binaries and the to the selected mods/maps - except of the map-paths which are shared between all users on a host. This guarantees a 100% separation between static data + binaries on the one side and user date (savegames, logs, ...) on the other.

I'm still trying to find an ftp server that could host the debian package tree. I'll post more information when I've found one.

[Tobi]

I don't know what pbuilder/debuild is. My packages are just dh_make -created. It's no problem for me to make regular builds for sarge and sid. For ubuntu and co. I'd have to set up some new VMs for building. How does this pbuilder/debuild work?

I'm not exactly an expert, but pbuilder is mostly used to test packages build-depends by building them in a clean 'lab' environment: it builds the packages in a chroot (which makes it ultra slow too, as it needs to extract a 100M tarball [the chroot is .tar.gz'ed] before building...). Advantage is it's smaller on disk when not used, so you can keep more build environments on less disk space .

Debuild is just a wrapper for dpkg-buildpackage, but people say it's better. I don't know why. Debuild is in the devscripts package if I recall correctly.

I wonder how much sense it makes to build large map packs and .debs with mods in it.

I think pretty much. Those map packs are the basis for easy installation which is sometimes the difference between a user trying/using something or not. I'm going to add an option to add mods/maps that are not part of debian packages. Nevertheless, my primary interest is to provide the "1. apt-get, 2. it works" experience.

Well, I didn't mean to rip out the default mod/maps, I just wondered whether it would be of any use to pack more. But go ahead if you like it, you're making the packages after all

Currently there's a dialog-menu shown for mod-, map- and unit-selection. I'l try to make that menu X-based (maybe kdialog?). The settings made in the menus are used to create per user/per host/per display spring-directories consisting of a symlink-tree to all the base data/binaries and the to the selected mods/maps - except of the map-paths which are shared between all users on a host. This guarantees a 100% separation between static data + binaries on the one side and user date (savegames, logs, ...) on the other.

I'm still trying to find an ftp server that could host the debian package tree. I'll post more information when I've found one.

Sounds cool, and sounds like something which would benefit all of the linux community

I'll see if I can help finding a place to host the package tree, can't promise anything tho.

E: oh and once we found a ftp, if you up the source too I can build ubuntu dapper packages.

[fbo]

Good News:

I found an ftp server . It will take some time (~ 2 days) to transfer all the files there (~ 1GB) - I'll post the URL here, when the server is ready.

[clericvash]

Could someone give me the lowdown as to what is going on?

I am getting a positive linux vibe from this topic now :)

[Tobi]

packages for sarge/sid are being uploaded, thanks to fbo

[clericvash]

So i may possibly be able to run ta-spring on ubuntu?

[Tobi]

Yeah, if you're lucky they work out of the box on ubuntu. If not you'd need to recompile them, but that's not really hard (and if this ftp has more space and you've some more time, I can recompile and upload them).