New Release - Whats left to do?

Development directions, tasks, and features being actively implemented or pursued by the development team.
log0

Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by log0 »

I know I am repeating myself. But I still think it would be a good idea to ship the wrap_oal.dll with the Windows release for people not having OpenAL installed or provided by soundcard driver so that they can have sound right from the start. I had no sound on two different machines before installing OpenAL manually. E.g. Blender is distributing with a wrap_oal.dll.
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by pyramid »

That is a good idea. I was struggling with sound on my old notebook.
I'll commit that dll if there a re no objections.
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by pheonixstorm »

Actually the install package should auto install the openal installer in the svn as well as the vs2008 runtime (if either are required). I still have not found anything that requires that dll.. vs doesnt, openal32 doesnt....
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by pyramid »

I have a Win 7 machine without admin rights, so I cannot install anything. By copying the win32 dir to my notebook I am able to run VS but without sound. In cases like this wrap_oal helps run VS with sound. I hope there is no conflict with the normal openal install where applicable.
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by shenle »

I think we should somehow get the installer (when finished) tested on some "pristine" systems, which haven't had all sorts of dlls and runtimes installed on them as our development/testing machines have... I tried once a recent (>13000) binary on a Win7/64 system that never had VS or any compilers installed on it and the binary didn't run, as in no window showing up at all... In event log there were some errors related to VS and msvcr90.dll IIRC. Unfortunately I haven't had time to dig more in-depth, and I don't have access to that computer anymore (it was at a friend's house last week).
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by log0 »

the install package should auto install the openal installer in the svn as well as the vs2008 runtime
I see. I downloaded the binaries from svn and didn't use the installer.
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by charlieg »

I can test. I have never really played Vega Strike so haven't installed it either.
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by klauss »

I finally after lots and lots of trial and error, got the OpenSUSE Build Service to build us our 0.5.1.beta1 package:

Look

I've only built the engine, I still have to package the data according to what we discussed earlier (minimalistic data, extra textures, music, speech). I'll do so soon.

One has to love that build service... it's really cool... it even has the ability to build for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and a ton of other platforms. No windows, though. Yet ;)
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by pyramid »

:D

Vega Strike on my favorite distro!

Fabulous achievement! :mrgreen:

Btw, when you're done with the packaging, we should make 2 things:
* make a wiki page listing all distros that provide VS for download through their package management system
* make a dev blog post about the new available packages.

I can help with that.

Do you need help with testing a clean install?

*EDIT*
included some distro info for binary packages on the wiki.
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by klauss »

pyramid wrote: Btw, when you're done with the packaging, we should make 2 things:
* make a wiki page listing all distros that provide VS for download through their package management system
* make a dev blog post about the new available packages.

I can help with that.
Cool, but lets test it a bit ourselves first, it would be a bummer to publish the availability of 0.5.1.beta1 packages only to find out later that they're all broken ;)
pyramid wrote:Do you need help with testing a clean install?
I have a fraken-SuSE 11.2 (which is 11.2 with factory repos added and a lot of crazy dangerous stuff done to package management ;) ), I'm developing mostly on a rather clean 11.3 , so I can test those two, but any help will be much appreciated, since I have no pristine install.

I do have a live DVD, afaik, one can install stuff on those (if one uses a scratch partition) - I might give it a try. If I can set aside a scratch partition.
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by greenfreedom10 »

klauss wrote:I still have to package the data according to what we discussed earlier (minimalistic data, extra textures, music, speech).

One has to love that build service... it's really cool... it even has the ability to build for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and a ton of other platforms. No windows, though. Yet ;)
That sounds great!

So what size of dataset are you thinking about? Will you split the dataset into several parts? Shall I try to find out from debian-devel-games list what is acceptable for inclusion in Debian main, in case VegaStrike were added later?

If VegaStrike is hosting the package files, size does not really matter I suppose...
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by klauss »

I'll get you the precise numbers once I divide the dataset, but since textures are easily compressed, I might make the RPMs (or deb?) gunzip them on install, which would make the packages a lot smaller.

It depends on the final size of the package, whether it's worth it or not.

In any case, a rough estimate of uncompressed sizes:
  • Core: 1.1G
  • Music: 158M
  • Extra: 56M
  • Speech: 31M
Core is a bit big. I'll have to figure out a way to make it smaller (compressing might help).
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by shenle »

Really? My local data repository is 2.79GB (which includes about 100MB of win32 binaries).
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by pyramid »

shenle wrote:Really? My local data repository is 2.79GB (which includes about 100MB of win32 binaries).
That is prbably with the .svn history included. Without data is around 1.1 GB.
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by pheonixstorm »

compression will help out a lot. I think compressed I was able to get it down by half. It will depend a lot on the compression method used too.

My working copy of VS (play testing) is 1.28gb thats w/o all the extra svn stuff. It has NOT been updated for awhile so this may have grown a bit, my vs binary is from december 22nd
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by shenle »

Oops, that's true

I do play testing on my svn copy. Whenever I do svn update vegastrike, I also svn update data. :)
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by safemode »

When packaging up always use svn export to create a clean non-svn polluted directory tree.

I dont think there will be much you can do to reduce the size of the texture package. We dont have configuration settings to handle not having certain ships (we just load them without textures or throw errors etc)... so you have to include them all. The one good thing though is that hopefully a patch system is put in place so that you only need to create this huge package once and then subsequent ones are only diffs to it.

On a side note. It should be possible to have a python directory in /data include a small script that gives the name and path and inserts the correct Unit.csv line for a given unit (if not already there) and thus "installs" every individual unit separately during initialization of the game. This way we can add units modularly without having to mess with anything in the rest of /data ourselves. The game will copy the files to the correct area and insert the correct lines in Units.csv and un-installing can be done in a similar fashion.

This can allow us to eventually split the initial data package up by unit (much better). Certain scripts that demand specific units could then be written with a "requires" directory that will look to see if the correct unit has been installed (can grep the new unit install script directory).
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by klauss »

Well, the texture set can be reduced a lot by downsampling some big textures.

Planet textures and station textures tend to be big.

But big textures are a feature, so I'd rather not do that.
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by pyramid »

We could also put the unit faction specific textures in the extra package. It won't save much though, as only few more recent additions have faction textures (e.g. vessels/H496).
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by klauss »

Reviewing a bit, I noticed the Seaxbane has two sets of identical textures, the regular textures, and a few "_high" textures. But the high aren't higher-res or anything, and they look identical.

I'd say they're redundant.

I wonder if there are any more cases like that - the Seaxbane's high textures don't amount to much, only a couple MB.
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by klauss »

Ok, I prepared the tar balls:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vegast ... ike/0.5.1/

Now, installation instructions are a bit complex, as each tar ball unpacks itself to a different directory, and users would have to put them all together.

Any suggestions?

I'd suggest:

Code: Select all

~$ mkdir vegastrike-0.5.1.beta1
~$ tar xvjf vegastrike-src-0.5.1.beta1
~$ cd vegastrike-src-0.5.1.beta1
~/vegastrike-src-0.5.1.beta1$ mkdir build
~/vegastrike-src-0.5.1.beta1$ cd build
~/vegastrike-src-0.5.1.beta1/build$ cmake ..
...
~/vegastrike-src-0.5.1.beta1/build$ make
...
~/vegastrike-src-0.5.1.beta1/build$ cd ../../vegastrike-0.5.1.beta1
~/vegastrike-0.5.1.beta1$ mkdir bin
~/vegastrike-0.5.1.beta1$ cp ../vegastrike-src-0.5.1.beta1/build/{vegastrike,vegaserver,setup/vssetup,objconv/mesh_tool} bin/.
~/vegastrike-0.5.1.beta1$ tar xvjf ../vegastrike-data-0.5.1.beta1.tar.bz2 --strip-components=1
...
~/vegastrike-0.5.1.beta1$ tar xvjf ../vegastrike-extra-0.5.1.beta1.tar.bz2 --strip-components=1
...
~/vegastrike-0.5.1.beta1$ tar xvf ../vegastrike-music-0.5.1.beta1.tar --strip-components=1
...
~/vegastrike-0.5.1.beta1$ tar xvf ../vegastrike-speech-0.5.1.beta1.tar --strip-components=1
...
The nice thing is an installer script could do all that ;)
Last edited by klauss on Sun Feb 27, 2011 7:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Correcting install instructions
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by pyramid »

Nice. Btw, when was mesher renamed to mesh_tool on Linux? On windows it's still mesher. Should we not align those names?
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by klauss »

autotools still builds it as mesher, but cmake names it mesh_tool.

Not sure why the rename.
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by klauss »

Well guys, VS packaged for SuSE.

There are two projects with the required packages, because instead of branching off home:etrash:games I just asked to be a maintainer ;)

home:etrash:games has the engine binaries and core data

home:klaussfreire has the extra data packages, like extra textures, music, speech.

I would love it if people with SuSE could test them. I haven't been able to test them yet, my comp is short on spare HD bytes :shock:

While I try to free up space, anyone able would be more than welcome to add these repos to their Yast and test away ;)

I'd like to know:
  1. If it works. It should.
  2. If it works with a minimal install (engine + core data)
  3. If it works with minimal+music
  4. If it works with minimal+speech(+music)
  5. If it works with minimal+extra(+speech+music)
Possible points of failure are:
  • Missing files in the minimal setup - perhaps I moved something that should be on core
  • Wrong paths, vssetup or vegastrike not finding the config file, data folder, stuff like that
Repo urls for YAST:
Last edited by klauss on Sun Feb 27, 2011 4:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Added 11.1 repo and fedora
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Re: New Release - Whats left to do?

Post by Deus Siddis »

By the way, are the new asteroid models in place for the soon-to-be release?
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