There's an ebuild for the demo of Gish but no ebuild for the full game. I've created one and tested it on amd64. The demo version (1.0) required a wrapper for a couple of reasons but this no longer seems to be necessary for the current full version (1.51). It seems freealut is no longer required either. I thought about adding the demo USE flag so that it could replace the existing ebuild but I think the latest demo version is still only 1.0 so that wouldn't be such a good idea.
Created attachment 139539 [details] gish-1.51.ebuild
1.52 is out. No changes to the ebuild. Unfortunately the filename hasn't changed either. Not sure what should be done in this case.
Created attachment 197638 [details] gish-1.52.ebuild It occurred to me that there should be "x86?" around the non-amd64 dependencies. This needs to be fixed in the demo version as well. I've added a note about a known bug in the game that causes it to crash after starting level 1-6. The solution is to turn the music off during that level. Another problem with the demo version is that the wrapper references freealut in "lib" when it should be lib32 on amd64 systems. I guess that belongs in another bug report though?
Gish-1.53-1 is out. No changes to the ebuild. Unfortunately the filename hasn't changed either. Not sure what should be done in this case.
Echoooo. Heh. I was a bit puzzled about 1.53 because it's not available from Chrono Logic where I bought my copy but it is available through the temporarily-available Humble Indie Bundle. The game itself also seems to have been passed into the hands of Cryptic Sea but when you go to buy the game there, it just refers you onto Steam. The great news is there's now a native 64-bit binary and the dependency on the outdated version of OpenAL has gone. Chrono Logic previously told me that both these things would happen so maybe they will still release this version on their site. Otherwise I'm not sure where you'd get it from after that bundle offer expires. The bad news is that the game no longer uses ~/.gish and there's no workaround, short of making the game directory writable or creating a bunch of symlinks. Apparently the problem has been reported to Cryptic Sea so hopefully someone is working on it. See http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=754438#p754438.
This game is open source now.
I'd like to do an ebuild for this but I'm a little buried at the moment.
Attaching an updated ebuild for 1.53. This is still for the binary version, but the following changes have been made: * installs 64-bit binary if on amd64 * modified dependencies to drop emulation libs for amd64 and treat x84/amd64 the same * added warning and workaround info about save game/settings issue * cleaned up variables to limit hardcoded values
Created attachment 235199 [details] games-arcade/gish-1.53.ebuild
Mostly done the open source ebuild now. Was much easier than the other games because there are few dependencies and they haven't bundled anything. :) Just need to fix the path issues. Shouldn't take long.
I've done the patches and I'm just waiting for the last ones to be merged upstream. I need some advice about the demo version. I'd like to keep supporting it but I'm not sure what the best approach would be. A single ebuild with the demo USE flag would be nice but you cannot turn off fetch restrictions for individual files so it would still have to be downloaded manually. Alternatively, we could keep have a standalone gish-demo ebuild. The ebuild is relatively simple so duplication isn't an issue. Finally, we could split it in three, engine, full data and demo data. Your thoughts?
It's also come to my attention that there is a "FreeGish" data set. It's pretty ugly right now and I'm not sure if it'll really come to anything but some people seem keen. We'd have to make sure that the binary can work with more than one data directory.
In all the cases I'm familiar with, demo versions of games seem to have there own ebuilds. I don't see any reason why this couldn't be merged into a single ebuild, but I also can't think of a really good reason to deviate from the standard. Having separate ebuilds for the binary and source versions may also make sense. Again, this is how I seem to call other games handling this (eg., quake3). Depending on how the data is supposed to be installed, a separate data ebuild may also be worthwhile; this is how the bigger games like quake3 seem to handle it, but I'm not as much of a fan of this approach. Personally I'd rather just see the main game ebuild (be it binary or source) automatically install the necessary data along with it rather than requiring me to install yet another package, but maybe there are technical reasons for this that I'm not familiar with. Well, there are my thoughts on the topic, as indecisive as they may be. :-) Hope it helps.
*bump*? What's with the opensource ebuild?
There was a flurry of development around GitHub with hopes of developing a new game around "FreeGish" but it all ground to a halt in August due to commitment issues. There were some good fixes and one of the last things they did was convert the massive TGA textures to PNG. I was keen to retain backwards compatibility with the retail data set so one of the guys wrote some Java code that strips all the textures from the level files and converts them to external PNG files. There were some problems with it though, some of which I fixed and some of which I didn't. Since that development has stalled, I've debated over whether I should backtrack and just cherry pick some of the more useful commits over the original source release. With a baby due any day now, this has fallen way down my own priority list but the recent release of the second Humble Indie Bundle has had me thinking about it again.
Created attachment 314851 [details] games-arcade/gish-1.6.1.ebuild Gish 1.6.1 was released a while back. The new ebuild has a few, mostly minor, changes: * Supports package naming convention * Supports new binary file names and additional files * Documentation is included again, so restored that functionality and added doc USE flag for html/swf manual * Menu shortcut now references absolute icon path; this seems to be necessary to make freedesktop.org environments support a BMP icon Biggest improvement: preferences and saves are now stored in ~/.gish/. Yay! Removed postinst warning about this as a result.
That's great. I got a bit disheartened by the mess on GitHub. The most important thing was the preferences location and now that's been sorted. It would still be nice to build from source though. I wonder if we can get the sources for that version. Aren't they legally obliged by the GPL?
Doesn't look like they'll continue to make the source available for future official releases. From their forum (http://www.pontifex2.com/smf/index.php/topic,1346.0.html): "The source code released is a separate branch then the version that we are using and there won't be any official update to the source code at this time. I don't think there are actually any difference in the source code between the public version and version 1.6 except for maybe some minor file saving path stuff." As far as GPL compliance, I think they're only obligated to make the source code available for any version released under the GPL. If they decide to hack their own future versions from a separate brance and release them under a different license, then that's still fully compliant. Kind of crappy, but certainly their right. I do wish the source code for all of those games had been more widely picked up and supported. I remember there was a lot of activity around Aquaria as well shortly after it's release, but nothing ever came of that. I was particularly looking forward to some updates and improvements there.
Also, random developer question: In the ebuild I uploaded last night, I have EAPI=2 set. This works perfectly fine. However, if I set EAPI=4, installation fails with this: * ERROR: games-arcade/gish-1.6.1 failed (install phase): * fowners failed <SNIP> * ERROR: games-arcade/gish-1.6.1 failed (install phase): * fperms failed <SNIP> * ERROR: games-arcade/gish-1.6.1 failed (install phase): * fowners failed <SNIP> * ERROR: games-arcade/gish-1.6.1 failed (install phase): * fperms failed The only way I could get that to go away was to remove all file installation activity (doins, newexe, etc.) from the install phase, which obviously isn't helpful. What's actually causing that? I've worked with ebuilds using EAPI=4 before and never rand into that problem. As for troubleshooting last night, I had absolutely no luck, so when I found EAPI=2 works as intended, I just switched to that and called it done.
(In reply to comment #18) > I do wish the source code for all of those games had been more widely picked > up and supported. I remember there was a lot of activity around Aquaria as > well shortly after it's release, but nothing ever came of that. I was > particularly looking forward to some updates and improvements there. A little off-topic but actually a huge amount of work was done on Aquaria by Andrew Church and that subsequently led to the PSP release. I'm on the mailing list and I still see the odd patch by others even now. Occasionally Ryan Gordon gets around to merging them.
(In reply to comment #20) > A little off-topic but actually a huge amount of work was done on Aquaria by > Andrew Church and that subsequently led to the PSP release. That doesn't help me as a Linux user much. :-) I read that the same work also fed into the ipad release, but again, not useful for me. I'd like to see an official 1.1.4 or a 1.2 or whatever release that includes any new goodies or fixes that have been incorporated over the last few years.
(In reply to comment #21) > (In reply to comment #20) > > A little off-topic but actually a huge amount of work was done on Aquaria by > > Andrew Church and that subsequently led to the PSP release. > > That doesn't help me as a Linux user much. :-) I read that the same work > also fed into the ipad release, but again, not useful for me. I'd like to > see an official 1.1.4 or a 1.2 or whatever release that includes any new > goodies or fixes that have been incorporated over the last few years. It does help because he kept a separate branch of all the platform-neutral improvements and they were all merged by Ryan Gordon.
