Glest on Linux/PPC

[David Holm(dholm)]

Glest is a new open source 3D strategy game originally written for windows. It was ported to Linux by Matthias Braun but sadly it was not endian safe.
I have now managed to fix several of the endian issues so that the game will run on Linux/PPC and hopefully other big endian architectures, you can grab my patch here http://rift.ath.cx/~avatar/glest-1.0.10-endian.patch.gz.

Glest will run on Linux/PPC but the following problems still exist, so if you feel that you might be able to fix any of these remaining problems please help us. :)

* Sound samples are not byte swapped (only the headers), sound is corrupted.
* I have only fixed endianess where fread or f.read is used. Sections of code where fwrite is used still needs to be fixed.
* GL_ARB_texture_env_crossbar is not available in the open source ATI driver, I have disabled the check for this in the code but I don't know what effect this will have on the game (I'm not an OpenGL expert)
* The game is extremely slow, I'm not sure what is causing this but I'm sure there is a way to fix it. Someone with OpenGL skills might want to have a look at this.
* I never went past the main menu and configure menu since it is so slow, I noticed that some of the graphics running in the background appear corrupted, so I might have missed something or messed up some of the byte swapping.

[Sven Luther(sven)]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 05:01:07AM +0000, dholm wrote:
> Glest (http://www.glest.org/) is a new open source 3D strategy game originally written for windows. It was ported to Linux (http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uxsm/glest/) by Matthias Braun but sadly it was not endian safe.
> I have now managed to fix several of the endian issues so that the game will run on Linux/PPC and hopefully other big endian architectures, you can grab my patch here .
>
> The following problems still exist, so if you feel that you might be able to fix any of these please help us. :)
>
> * Sound samples are not byte swapped (only the headers), sound is corrupted.
> * I have only fixed endianess where fread or f.read is used. Sections of code where fwrite is used still needs to be fixed.
> * GL_ARB_texture_env_crossbar is not available in the open source ATI driver, I have disabled the check for this in the code but I don't know what effect this will have on the game (I'm not an OpenGL expert)

Normally the code should be able to check for the presence of an extension,
and it should be harmless if the extension is not present. Why did you have to
remove this check.

Friendly,

Sven Luther

[David Holm(dholm)]

Emanuel Steen (kozz) has updated the patch and fixed several issues. The game will now run, but as soon as you interact with your units the game will segfault.
Get the latest patch here: http://www.pegasos.org/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=723&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

[David Holm(dholm)]

If you set 'FogOfWar' to '0' in glest.ini you can watch the AI players work. You'll notice that the game is actually running pretty fast even though we do not have perfect 3D drivers yet. Thank kozz for this tip.

[Emanuel Steen(Kozz)]

Yep, it seems playable imho, would be nice to have it working. I'm sure the segfault is really easy to fix, just have to find it... but there must be someone good on OpenGL here.

[Matt Sealey(Neko)]

[Emanuel Steen(Kozz)]

You are very well free to prove me wrong, and while doing that mabye solve the problem? :D

[David Holm(dholm)]

[dwmw2]

We seem to be packaging glest for Fedora Extras now, so a bug has been filed about the lack of PPC support. The patches referenced above seem to have gone missing though -- does anyone still have a copy of the latest?

[Emanuel Steen(Kozz)]

I have something left, not sure whether it is the latest. And Glest has reached a higher version now so might be that it doesn't apply cleanly anymore, but it's something.

http://kozz.org/files/games/glest/glest-1.0.10-endian.patch.gz

[dwmw2]

Thanks. I've found a patch elsewhere and made it build; now I just find that glest refuses to run because my OpenGL is too old.

http://david.woodhou.se/glest-cvs-incomplete-be-enabling.patch
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=219540

[Luca Barbato(lu_zero)]

with the patch the result is the following:

- the fonts are painful to read
- the sound is still broken
- it fails to load a texture.

basically it has still a long way to go...

[Emanuel Steen(Kozz)]

I updated the patch for version 2.x of glest, or the cvs actually. Everything seems to work, both ogg and wav audio, all textures etc. It's not the most beautiful patch ever seen, but it works - anyone is free to clean it up. Also tried on an little endian machine and it still works so seems good.

However, it is awfully slow on the Pegasos, but playable.

http://kozz.org/files/games/glest/glest-cvs20070102-endian.patch.gz


Ohh, and about the fonts. I didn't had the default font on my computer, but it is easy to simply change it to something else in glest.ini. Find you available fonts with xfontsel or such.

[Luca Barbato(lu_zero)]

It doesn't render correctly on the r300 and the fonts are pitiful...

I'll try again later, the music now is pretty fine =)

[Emanuel Steen(Kozz)]

Strange, works fine for me... but I have a R200 card.