Projekt Weltherrscher - "Phase 2"

[paul_nicholls]

That is awesome Sascha, nice one!
Lazarus rocks!

[Sascha Willems]

Believe it or not! After a month of hard work (with very little sleep) I'm proud to present the first public linux release!

If you've followed my blog you may have seen me post several articles on going multi-platform where I wrote about my experiences porting the game over to linux, and though at times I thought I'd never get this done (linux differs a lot from windows) I finally got a fully playable linux version done, and if you'd run it fullscreen along a windows version you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. So linux users now get the same experience as windows users. So from now on the game's source compiles with Delphi and Lazarus and on Windows and linux. MacOSX support is also planned, and hopefully not as hard to implement now with linux supported.

But please note that I could only test on one distribution and since it's a different compiler there may be bugs not present in the windows version. So if you get it to run on linux I'd love to hear on what distribution.

Downloads

• Linux :http://www.saschawillems.de/download...nuxi386.tar.gz (.tar.gz, ~65 MBytes)
  Important note : Please run the "startprojectw.sh" script inlcuded in the download instead of the application itself. The game uses libbass.so (BASS sound API) which needs to be located by linux, so if you don't have this installed and run directly the game may not launch. That's why I created the start script to change the ld_path.

• Windows : http://www.saschawillems.de/download...v142_win32.zip (.zip, ~60 MBytes)

[Super Vegeta]

Welp, my card doesn't support compressed textures. Are you doing Load_GL_X_X calls anywhere? Cause though my driver info displays 1.4, calls up to 3.1 are successful in my programs and I've been quite happily using OGL 2.X stuff.

[Sascha Willems]

Well, I'm using our dglOpenGL.pas for linux too and that just uses glXGetProcAddress to get the procedure addresses. But as for the compressed textures I simply check against the presence of GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc in the extension string, and if that's not present the game won't run.

Maybe I'll have to check against a different (newer) extension instead of the GL_EXT_ one, but e.g. GL_ARB_Compression is completly different. I'll look into this issue.

P.S. : What graphics card are you using? Could you upload a report to http://delphigl.de/glcapsviewer/listreports.php if you haven't done so, so I can see what it supports?

[Super Vegeta]

Ok, I uploaded my report here.
Although there is no GL_EXT_texture_compression, I see GL_ARB_texture_compression listed. So well, if you'd be able to get it to work, that'd be great. If not, I guess I'll have to wait a bit till I can get my hands on the game.

[Sascha Willems]

Sadly GL_ARB_texture_compression is something different than GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc. The first one only "tells" that texture compression is supported when it's present and that compressed textures can be used. But all my textures are stored using DDS (DXT1, DXT3 and DXT5) and GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc is necessary to directly upload these compressed formats via OpenGL. And I thought this was an industry standard, as even valve's OpenGL games need this extension to run. So no, it's sadly not easily possible to move away from that extension.

[phibermon]

Hi Sascha, if compressed textures are not supported on the card you can decompress the images system side before you upload them. The algorithms and various code examples are available if I remember correctly.

I don't do this either at the moment as I'm GL3.2+ only and the only configurations I know of hardware/software that support GL3 that don't also have st3c are open source drivers on Linux (as the support is still an extension (not core) and patented etc so trouble for open source development)

It should be quite easy to decompress however, the algorithm must only take a few short steps in silicon to return decompressed values, that means it's probably not going to be anything beefy or stream based.