Cooking up recipes

20 July 2007

Well, the last week has been fun. I’ve been cooking up several recipes for GoboLinux, some of which I’ve contributed to the project.

As I blogged before, I made a recipe for TrueCombat 0.45. Also, I updated GTK-Engines, GTK-Theme-Switch, and a few other minor things.

Also, I’ve been working on a recipe for Urban Terror, which is a popular free first-person shooter built on the ioquake3 engine that started out as a Quake3 total conversion mod. Currently, I’m asking for feedback on that recipe, namely on issues like the proprietary BattlEye component, which is anti-cheat software.

I must possess Jedi mind powers, because I managed to get commit access on GoboLinux’s recipe SVN repository. There was a large backwash of recipes on the mailing list, so Hisham Muhammad asked for volunteers. I knew that I had only been contributing recipes for a week, but I did want to become a committer at some point, so I volunteered, telling him in the next 6 months, I might have enough reputation to become one. However, he gave me commit access straight away, which is awesome.

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Standalone TrueCombat 0.45 with ioquake3

8 July 2007

Because it seems the trendy thing to do lately, I’ve been working on making TrueCombat 0.45, a popular mod for Quake3 way back in 2001, a standalone game. And, before you ask, I’m doing TC 0.45 because it’s probably the easiest option for me, having never done this sort of thing before.

First of all, I’m compiling ioquake3 from source, with branding modifications. Also, I’m using pak0.pk3 which is ripped from OpenArena 0.60, as TrueCombat doesn’t run properly without it.

I’m amazed at OpenArena at the level of compatibility with Quake3 that it provides. Many mods from Quake3, the most recent one that I’ve played being q3rally, work just fine in OpenArena. TrueCombat 0.45, while not perfect, also runs quite well on OpenArena. There are a few missing textures, but I can fix that quite easily by either copying over extra textures or making them myself with The GIMP.

I’m working of an SVN working copy of ioquake3, which makes it really easy to keep track of what customisations I’ve made to the source code, and I can even export all modifications in a nice little .patch file that can be applied against a fresh working copy.

Oh, and earlier, I wrote about using GoboLinux, an interesting little Linux distribution which revamps the filesystem structure. Simultaneously to my standalone TC 0.45 development, I’ve been writing GoboLinux recipes which allows you to compile up ioquake3 from source, apply TC branding, download the paks I’ve made, (basically gets you fragging in minutes) all from one tiny little command you type in the terminal: Compile TrueCombat

I’m not sure of the licensing of TrueCombat 0.45. While I’m sure nobody will sue me for bringing an old mod back to life by hacking it slightly, it isn’t open source, which is why I have no plans of submitting it to GoboLinux’s recipe repository. I might want to ask TeamTerminator about that matter.

Anyway, there’s other things I wanted to post about this, but I’ve since forgotten. Oh well! ;)

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GoboLinux

2 April 2007

For a bit of fun, I’ve been trying out GoboLinux on my computer. GoboLinux is a distro where the most major feature is that its directory structure has been completely revamped.

On normal Linux/Unix systems, you will have various directories, such as /bin, /etc, /usr, /var; then you would expect to find binaries in /bin, /usr/bin, and /usr/local/bin. That particular convention in the directory structure has a lot of history attached to it.

However, GoboLinux takes a fresh approach (in terms of Linux distros, anyway) of revamping the structure, with directories such as /Files, /Programs, /System, and /Users.

I won’t bother repeating too much of what has already been said on the website, so go and have a read of it yourself.

And yes, I am writing this post on GoboLinux!

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