Glest 3.2.1 for Mac OS X

[KaSek]

Hi all,

I released Glest 3.2.1 for Mac OS X.
As usual, you can get it from my site:

http://ciderhouse.opal.ne.jp/wp/english/glest

Enjoy!

[ebonweaver]

Contrary to the indication of the instructions, you MUST install the data BEFORE you run GestConf.

Attempting to use Shadowmapping will result in a crash when loading a scenario.

Changes to the sound options do not take effect until a scenario is loaded.

[KaSek]

The purpose to run GlestConf for new user is to check the version of OpenGL. You don't need to install the game data even if you see a error message. You can ignore it.

On my iMac, the shadow-mapping goes well. If Glest crashed, probably your GPU or OpenGL framework has a problem.

[Niedel]

For some reason, it is not letting me add any files to the game. I believe it was because the glest data didn't fully install. I don't have a file titled GleastGame in my library either, and I believe that this is where I am supposed to be putting any files that I want to add. Do any of you know what I could do to fix this situation?

[espadrine]

Hi!
I'm sorry, I clicked on the link and got the following:

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /wp/english/glest on this server.

Apache/1.3.41 Server at ciderhouse.opal.ne.jp Port 80

How should I do?
Thanks.

[koda]

hi! i have a couple of questions for the mac os x packager! first i want say that the porting is good and that my remarks here are only in hope of additional enhancements

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The game data will be installed into <Home>/Library/GlestGame folder. “glest.ini” (configuration file) is there.
in Mac OS X the configuration directory is in <Home>/Library/Application Support/ folder; this helps managing a slim library and a fast point of acces for changing any configuration for installed apps; is it possible to move GlestGame configuration folder to <Home>/Library/Application Support/ by default? is there a particular reason to keep a special folder in Library root?

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/Applications/Glest folder.

Glest Ver. 3.2.2r1 (Universal binary)
GlestConf Ver. 1.2.1 (Universal binary)
like I said above, i don't think that Glest needs its own directory also in the Application folder, expecially for only two applications: i believe that the whole program would feel more Mac-like if there were just the main application in the Applications folder and the configuration utility in the Utility section.

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    * Glest32App.dmg (4.9MB)
    * Glest32Data.pkg.zip (65.9MB)
why are you providing two downloads (one of which is dependent on the other)? you could put everything in the dmg bundle and have a mpkg do the unpacking of both for you.

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Glest32Data.pkg unpaking in /Users/Shared
this is the most important point i believe; the Users folder are for... users! why are you putting data? what if in the system there's a user named "Shared"? the bundle script is changing permissions and that is really bad! Normally in a mac application all data is stored in "<appname>/Contents/Resources" which simplifies deploying among users (and could save you from doing a double download). If you really don't like that place, the usual <homedir>/Library would be perfect, in my opinion.

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Although you can play the game with other players on the same LAN or Internet, you can’t connect to Windows/Linux. Only with Mac (Intel or PowerPC).
why?

I understand that the problems i listed are only because most likely the game wasn't thought to support additional platforms and having this configuration is already better than playing the game in vmware or whatnot; however i do believe that there's plenty of space for improvements and i hope that my comments here will help in producing a better and better port.

bye
Koda

[KaSek]

>koda

You need more study and consideration.
Before asking a question, you should think yourself and read source codes.

[silnarm]

>koda

You need more study and consideration.
Before asking a question, you should think yourself and read source codes.

KaSek,

You need more study and consideration.
Before posting a useless reply, think to yourself "I should be less arrogant" and "when people make legitimate criticisms, I should listen"

[mk12]

Yes, those were legitimate criticisms, which I was wondering about too. And shadow masking also crashes my iMac (the application just quits).

[Bruce]

I don't know how active this Port is, but thought I'd chime in anyway...

I'm a teacher at a school in Australia and I've recently chosen to use Glest in one of my classes - kids are creating models and designing new tech trees/factions etc and we're doing it all on Macs. I had a look at the port KaSek provided and it bundles and runs nicely for single users. Problem was, these kids don't have admin privileges do can't do installations of data or anything...

So, I grabbed the source from KaSek's site and have re-compiled and packaged it slightly differently. Here are the adjustments I've made at this stage:
1. All Data is included in a single package with the Application and gets installed in /Library/Application Support/Glest
2. The above folder has been granted permissions (recursively) of 777 to allow the kids the ability to make changes to the data files (more on this later).
3. Application is a single bundle that sits in the /Applications folder.
4. I noticed on KaSek's page that he indicates Multiplayer plays really slowly. With the new bundle (explained above), multiplayer crashes with the default .ini configuration, BUT if I disable shadows and various 3D effects etc, and turn on Fog of War, multiplayer works brilliantly and ISN'T slow - it plays as well as I've seen on Win/Linux. I haven't tried a network game with Windows or Linux users (and don't have that option available to me at this stage).

Now, this works nicely for what I'm doing because I don't particularly care about the kids having full access to all of the data files (if they ever corrupt anything I just blow them all away and restore the originals), but obviously isn't going to work for a production deployment. The other thing is that because I can't get my hands on the source for GlestConf, I can't incorporate the configuration tool into the bundle, which would be really handy (and something I'd insist on doing for any released package).

So, I guess what I'd really like to do is:
1. Find out what sort of permissions are required on the game data for users to RUN the game - I can then replace the global 777 on the data with something that is much more appropriate for a production release. The kids (and others!) can then add their own data as they develop their own mods.

2. Get my hands on the GlestConf source prepared for XCode (KaSek - do you have this available somewhere?) so that I can incorporate the configuration tool into the bundle.

If I can get those 2 things sorted, then I'll have a new Glest bundle that would ultimately improve on the already fantastic work KaSek has done. It also addresses some of the concerns expressed by koda (though there are still some more tweaks that would make it really nice - this places all of the glestdata (including config) into the /Library instead of user libraries - really the data should go in /Library and config variables should go into <Home>/Library).

Anyone out there able to throw me anything useful?

[ultifd]

kids are creating models and designing new tech trees/factions etc

Wow, that's very nice to hear.  
---------------------------------------------------
Sorry my post doesn't have any good info on it.  

[Bruce]

That's ok - it's great to hear them talking about how they're amazed they could find something that's so good for free, and then that they can customise the game so heavily. A lot of them have been doing simple things like dropping in extra units and things when the game starts (for some its their first experience with XML) but they've already got some interesting gameplay ideas.

Who knows - if I keep this unit going, we may end up with 5 or 6 new active members in the Glest community every 6 months or so. That can only be a good thing.

[-Archmage-]

What modeling program are they using, I assume Blender, because it's free and has direct G3D support.
I learned it very quickly from just figuring it out and others here, if any of your people need help with animation, that's my forte.

BTW, I'm 12, just so the kids know that.

Maybe I could give you a model I've been working on?

PS: What grade is the class?

[softcoder]

Hey Bruce, good stuff!

I'm a software engineer and we home-school our children. Part of their learning is using Blender and working on Glest (I'm helping with the software side and they make models and XML files) so we have a mini-version of what you are doing!

Is there a free version of the MAC OS? IF so I'd be willing to throw it in a Viretual Machine and try to make builds etc to help out.

Thanks

[Bruce]

Yep - they're using Blender for the reasons you've indicated Archmage. The skills will vary across the class (we're in week 3 now and all of them have had zero Blender/XML experience), so I'm not expecting everything to be brilliant and polished this early in the piece. I've directed them all to a stack of online tutorials to learn the modelling/animation side of things and that seems to be working well. The enthusiasm is through the roof, so I imagine some of them will produce some great stuff.

It's a Year 9/10 class, so they're all 14-16. I'm sure that if I let them know there's a 12 yo out there doing it the less confident ones might feel a bit better. In fact, I'll be directing them all to the forum here at some point (I've managed to arrange with the school/department to unblock this forum because it's a useful source of info), so they'll have a chance to ask questions and get help directly form this community.

We're getting a bit OT here, so I'll drag it back... Might need a new thread somewhere for the kids to engage with the community.

Softcoder: There's no free version of Mac OS, so I don't see a way you could help using a VM unless you purchased a Mac (a shame really). I have a development background, just not hugely familiar with the way XCode (Mac OS Dev Env) works yet. I was able to make the tweaks I mentioned in the above post only because I could grab the OS X Source from KaSek's site. Thanks for the offer - maybe some activity in the thread will be enough to drag some OS X Devs out.

[-Archmage-]

Yah, you'll probably need a new topic for the kids to post in.

Ok, end of OT.

[ultifd]

I haven't tried a network game with Windows or Linux users (and don't have that option available to me at this stage).

I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think that people who play Glest on a mac can play with Windows/Linux. 

[softcoder]

Correct, but at some point (not too far off) we'll solve that (I believe it has to do with Big Endian vs Little Endian which I have lots of experience with). That means sending data from one OS type to another (like Windows to Linux) requires special handling of the network data.

One the main game items are totally stable we can look into those kinds of things.

[ultifd]

Yeah.  
Endianness is confusing...

I wish I could be in a class where I could just do stuff associated with Glest...  

[Bruce]

Correct, but at some point (not too far off) we'll solve that (I believe it has to do with Big Endian vs Little Endian which I have lots of experience with). That means sending data from one OS type to another (like Windows to Linux) requires special handling of the network data.

One the main game items are totally stable we can look into those kinds of things.

With the Apple move from PPC to Intel processors, wasn't the BigEndian <-> LittleEndian issue removed? Isn't that why Macs can run the various flavours of Windows? Because the hardware incompatibilities were eliminated?

Has anyone been able to confirm what the issue is that prevents Macs and PCs from networking in Glest?

[ultifd]

Correct, but at some point (not too far off) we'll solve that (I believe it has to do with Big Endian vs Little Endian which I have lots of experience with). That means sending data from one OS type to another (like Windows to Linux) requires special handling of the network data.

One the main game items are totally stable we can look into those kinds of things.

With the Apple move from PPC to Intel processors, wasn't the BigEndian <-> LittleEndian issue removed? Isn't that why Macs can run the various flavours of Windows? Because the hardware incompatibilities were eliminated?

Has anyone been able to confirm what the issue is that prevents Macs and PCs from networking in Glest?

I was thinking about that too. I did a search on these forums and there were some posts about it... nothing good though. 
But I don't think anyone has ever tried a game between a Mac and a PC/Linux before...
Only between PC and linux.  

-----------------
It also seems KaSek is still active... his last blog post was January...
I guess you could try to contact KaSek here: http://ciderhouse.opal.ne.jp/wp/about/
See here: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fciderhouse.opal.ne.jp%2Fwp%2Fabout%2F&sl=ja&tl=en

[silnarm]

Greetings Bruce, and welcome 

Has anyone been able to confirm what the issue is that prevents Macs and PCs from networking in Glest?

What prevents them from networking are some simple checks in the code (which can be disabled in the ini, I believe).

The reason these checks are in place is because games between Windows / Linux / Mac will go out of synchronisation due to differences in floating point calculations.  Indeed, even on the same platform, if different compilers were used to produce the binaries, floating point will likely have been handled slightly differently and they will not be compatible.

Cheers.

[Thamster]

KaSek  , very nice work the binary runs very well for me on OSX Leopard. Thanks for releasing the source as well.
Now, I'm trying to build from your source.

I don't mean to ask silly questions, you posted the following on your site:
"You need Xcode 3.0 or later to build. You also need to place SDL, Ogg, Vorbis and Xerces framework into PrvFrameworks folder."

I grabbed those 4 framework folders from the Content folder of the Glest.app.
Most of the build errors went away though it still seems to have trouble finding some of the xerces includes.

for example;
Glest\ 3.2/shared_lib/include/xml/xml_parser.h

gives:
error: xercesc/util/XercesDefs.hpp: No such file or directory

Is there another dependency I need to add to the workspace?
Thanks in advance.

[Thamster]

K, so I sent KaSek a message directly via his website, he mentioned the following:

 "Hi,

Thank you for sending email.

I removed the header files intentionally. It's too big and useless for
ordinary users.You need to build the framework yourself or find it anywhere.

K.S
"

So it looks like you need to go to : http://archive.apache.org/dist/xml/xerces-c
and find the correct xercesc src or binary and place it in your library path somewhere.
I tried versions 3.0 3.1 and 2.8 with varying amounts of luck.
From searching on google and this forum I suspect that only xerces version 2.7 will work 100%.

Though, I'm still trying to find a xerces 2.7 src that will compile or a binary that will work for mac os x leopard 64 bit.

FYI:
I've been placing the includes/xercesc folder in:
"Glest 3.2/Xcode/PrvFrameworks/Xerces.framework/Versions/A/Headers"

for anyone interested.

Cheers.

[ultifd]

heh, I knew that if someone emailed Kasek, he would reply...   
Thanks for telling us...