[KillerShots]

Well, I've put up a site for a project that I've been working on for a while now... kinda curious about getting some feedback. You can find it here. Let me know what you think. Thanks

PS - I know the front page is somewhat devoid of pictures / graphics. That may eventually change, but for now I'm trying to keep the main page very simple.

 

[Kethinov]

Well, some initial impressions... I downloaded your alpha release for Linux. It requires a bunch of libs that most Linux installs won't have.

On my Ubuntu system, I needed to install Tulib graph library (libtulip-qt-2.0c2, libtulip-qt-2.0-dev, libqt4-gui) as well as the PNG runtime (libpng3) before the binary would execute. You may want to note this somewhere. There may be other uncommon deps (meaning not installed by default) that people will need to install that you need to note. My system probably had some of them installed already because I play a lot of games in Linux.

More severely, the binary wasn't very functional. The "New" button didn't work, and when I tried to "add a new camera" it complained that I had no OpenGL support. (Even though I do...)

I realize it's only an alpha. But you've got some work to do!

Your synopsis page makes the game sound really interesting. Definitely keep us posted with updates. I'll want to try this out as it matures. I've got a lot of friends thirsty for a new online game and yours sounds right up our alley. Good luck!

 

[KillerShots]

Hmm... The 'new' button does work, I think the root problem here is that it's thinking you don't have OpenGL support. I'll go back and re-check the OpenGL detection code - I'm sure that since you say you play lots of linux games that you must have OpenGL support. I have tested it on two linux systems - one with a GeForce FX 5600, one with an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. Neither complained about this problem, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Also, I should add that the only library you should need to install is QT 4 - the dependencies of that should cover everything else. I'll go ahead and add that to the download page.

Thanks for the feedback

EDIT: I have isolated the OpenGL detection code. It occurs when you add a new camera. It calls a QT Library function that will return true if it has a valid OpenGL context or false if it does not. This usually means that the system has no OpenGL support. I can think of two possible causes for this:

1. Libraries - I see you grabbed "libqt4-gui" - looks like a distro-specific package. See if you can find something along the lines of a "libqt4-opengl". I know when I threw the required libraries up for download for Windows, I saw a libqt4-gui in there, and it also needed a libqt4-opengl. I'm not sure how your distro divided up the QT support - QT itself isn't divided, you usually have to snag the whole thing.

2. This isn't very likely the problem, but check that you have your drivers properly installed.

You may want to post this up in the bug tracker.

 

[Kethinov]

There isn't a libqt4-opengl. The best match I could find was Tulib graph library (libtulip-qt-2.0c2, libtulip-qt-2.0-dev) which also brought up libqt4-gui in the search.

I'm very well sure my graphics drivers are correctly installed. Otherwise Mupen64 and PCSX wouldn't be running stuff at 60fps.

 

[KillerShots]

Hmm... Ok, I think we can knock out your drivers as a possibility, then.

Can you see if you can find a file called libQtOpenGL.so anywhere on your system? This is needed for OpenGL support under QT 4, and I could see its absense causing this sort of problem.

 

[Kethinov]

Nope, it's definitely not anywhere to be found. A recursive find (cd /; find -name libQtOpenGL.so) revealed nothing.

Edit: You could staticly compile it.

 

[KillerShots]

Hmm... if your distro does not have the OpenGL module, all I can suggest is to download and compile QT 4 from source (they don't seem to have .rpm's, .deb's, or any other binary format). Seems like quite a pain in the arse to me. I'll look into compiling a static version as well. It'll likely be a huge binary, but if that gets around this it may be worth it. EDIT: It appears that it's going to be difficult to statically link Qt into the binary; when I add the -static flag to the compile, it complains that it can't find the Qt OpenGL library (which I do have). I also had a thought - everything on my system is compiled with the -march=pentium4 flag. That would suggest to me that static binaries I generate with this system will only work on other pentium 4's. I could probably throw on a knoppix configured for this task, but I still need to get around the libraries not being found with the -static flag added.

EDIT2: I believe I can solve the -static flag issue by compiling another version of Qt with the static link flag. Then we can see if the resultant binary works on anyone else's system.

 

[Kethinov]

It was more a joke than anything else. Static compilation is generally a bad idea. Makes your software bloated. But if you're more concerned with making sure it works everywhere than performance, it can be good idea.

 

[KillerShots]

Well, I did compile a statically linked version of the editor and posted it on the editor's web page. Uncompressed, it's a monstrous 5.9 meg binary. I still have no idea whether or not it will work with the -march=pentium4 flags in the rest of my libraries, but it would be nice to find out definitively. You can find it here under the binaries heading.

Honestly, if you have the memory for it (It's cheap nowadays) static isn't bad... but it's damn hard to use plugins of any sort when you're doing statically-linked binaries. Back when I was first starting Gentoo, I compiled KDE and XFree86 with the static flag on. First time up took it less than 5 seconds... but you can't load non-built-in display drivers into X with the static flag (took me months to track that down). Ever since then, I've always been looking at how statically-linking something is going to burn me, but I can't argue with the performance boost.

 

[Kethinov]

Interesting. The static binary is displaying the *exact* same behavior.

Note: I'm not on a P4, it's an amd64 machine (running a 32 bit kernel, Ubuntu).