Spring RTS Engine

Hey guys, I'm a linux user who has been enjoying Spring via Wine for some time now. Its good fun, but theres a memory leak that makes me start paging when the game starts getting large and pretty much ruins the experience. How far along is the native linux port? Any ETA on a working release? Thanks for any info,

James

Its getting pretty close from what I've heard, apparently they're using the linux port code for the windows version aswell.

The game work fine one linux. I would even like to say that with the current tree, it work better than on windows.

The bad thing is that there is syncronisation problem when a linux player play with a windows one...and whe 32bits system play with 64bits etc...
(the problem are floating point wich are not rounded the same on all system)

If you're in gentoo, you're in luck. They have ebuild files waiting for you.
http://developer.berlios.de/projects/taspring-linux/

Is this only for gentoo?

I (XP SP2) played against a friend on linux using wine, and we had no real issues. Until the port is finished, wine should work just fine.

I imagine the standard gnu make compilation and setup can be done with an SVN checkout, but those ebuild files are for gentoo and maybe some other distros based on it.

Yes, wine works fine, until you get aways into the game and it uses up all of my memory and starts using the swap file, which reduces my framerate to about 3.. Even in the middle of the game, when I still have a very playable framerate, my sim time is easily 2-3x higher than everybody elses, and its not like I'm underpowered.. 2.4ghz barton cpu (400 bus), 1024mbs of ram and a 6600GT.

I think I'll give the SVN source a go around tonight and see if I can do anything with it. Its really not much help without the capability to play with windows users though.. It sounds like the whole networking system is going to need to be revamped, depending on identical floating point calculations doesnt seem like a very good idea for a game that wants to be multiplatform, or professional at all. Hopefully I'm wrong and some simple little translator can be made to make it all work.

Hopefully I'm wrong and some simple little translator can be made to make it all work.

No unfortunately you are completely right... no simple translators can be made to solve this :S

What about comiling on windows with all the same compilers and tools (MinGW if I remember?)
Has somebody tried it and checked if it makes those fp calculations same, and makes those sync issues go away?
Linux port works quite fine, only it's been giving me some "Bad soundcategory ARM KBOT tdf" or smth. like that errors, and crashed sometimes, but maybe it was before the WAV loader fix.
alik

Read the linux mailing list about it, we had very long discussions about sync problems and possible ways of fixing it

Sorry if this has been covered or I'm just dumb, but I've searched around a little and found nothing.. I pulled down the latest code off the SVN just now and managed to build it succesfully. I've got it so I can select a AI and map, but as soon as I select a map, a screen of that map loading flashes for a moment and then Spring completely crashes to my desktop, where my mouse is locked (X is not locked.. just the mouse) until I restart my X server. Any ideas of what may have gone wrong and what I can do to fix it?

Ok, after a little poking around and running the game from a term so it actually spits out a error: it was crashing when it looked for a file in XTA (the only file I put in mods) in Features/All Worlds/rockfeatures.tdf, which doesnt exist. I tried switching to the latest AA, and I got the exact same behavior, screen flash when I select a map, and a error complaining about some file not existing. Is this just totally whack?

SO I made it work.. kinda. I downloaded the old spring for linux package off berlios and copied the map and mod files into my compiled version. It runs now, but I have no visible mouse cursor (although the mouse does exist/work), and there are tons of graphics/textures missing. There appear to be no unit textures at all. Is there a updated XTA sdz that I need or something? How about the mouse? I'm using Xorg7 and Gnome 2.13.4 with the latest nvidia drivers.. Also, when spring crashes, it hard locks the mouse until I restart X.. That should probably be fixed.

You can take XTA from the windows version.
Once copied, it worked fine.
It was the only problem I've had on linux.

Is the Linux-Port mailing list been active the last weaks? If so, there must be something wrong with it or with my mail cause i don't receive mail from it for almost a month now...

PM, It's active.

Rukk, please mail the mailinglist with any patches or bugreports.

I tried it in wine, i just kept getting the error 'no mods found' it can't find the mods folder

Is your mod folder in your /spring/ dir?

For me spring is running almost fine under linux - except I can't activate shadows (had one/two crashes and of course, exactly when I wasn't running from gdb).

I downloaded the taspring-data (downloads page at berlios if I remember correctly) and put into trunk/game (maybe it's not the best solution... but for now it works).

The linux lobby (omni in the svn) is not finished, but it is worked on. I think you can join a game if somebody else hosts it, but I didn't tried myself.