Questions to NGD

[Boukarou]

Hi,

I'm contributing to the Slax live distro by porting packages for that slackware based OS, i've been using it to play Regnum for a while with very good performance.
Now i'd like to share that package with the Slax community who's enthousiastic about proposing quality games. Of-course, the game would be proposed exactly as it is for the official release you provide already.

I wouldn't post my Regnum packages unless I get your permission to do so.

Tell me how you feel about that.

Regards,

[onemyndseye]

Hi Bruce...

I dunno if we can expect an answer here but I have considered doing the same for debian based systems. I think I even still have some scripts lying around to wrap up rolaucher for a system-wide type install if you are interested

take care ;)

[surak]

A system wide install wouldn't need a game directory writable by everybody?

[Nightchill]

A system wide install wouldn't need a game directory writable by everybody?

i'm guessing you'd still need ~/.regnum/live/ for writing if that's what you mean

[surak]

But how would you handle the game updates?

[Nightchill]

well regnum package could be updated from repository in a manner that with every new update someone puts the latest version in repos, but it'd be much easier if regnum could just download new patches to the home dir and have only it's core installed system wide.

[surak]

That wouldn't solve the problem of the launcher updating itself...

EDIT: or the game binaries.

[Boukarou]

In the case of Slax, the packages are simply compressed folders that are added to your root directory and every changes you made are saved in a separate package. So the update files are automatically stored in a separated package next to your screenshots, logs etc ...

I've been using it for more than one year on my computer on a usb stick with no worries. The only time i remade my 'distributable' package is when you guys released the version 1.0, but that was for the fun of it, I still could play the game with my original 'release'.

On a computer with 2 gig of ram, i can store the entire OS and the game into a ramdisk, and that is very very sweet.

[Mikan]

That wouldn't solve the problem of the launcher updating itself...

EDIT: or the game binaries.
Hi Surak,

Games that need this kind of functionality tend to use an "overlay file system". Essentially, you have a base directory, such as /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/share where the game's primary files reside and are assumed to be read-only. Then you "overlay" another directory on top of it, such as ~/.regnum, and file from that directory take higher priority for patching purposes. For example, when the launcher starts up, it would first look for ~/.regnum/rolauncher, and if it exists, run it instead. The game would also have the same behavior - it would look for resources in ~/.regnum/live before it looked for them in /usr/share/games/regnum/live.

In this way every component of the game could be updated at will, with the downside that eventually all of the userspace content may replace all of the system-wide content and thus you will have two almost-complete installations of significant size wasting disk space. However, this would be very unliikely to happen as distributions would update their packages and thus, the system wide files, to newer Regnum versions periodically. The game would simply have to check for outdated patch files in userspace and delete them to conserve disk space if the same file is already available system-wide.

This functionality would be difficult to code, but very flexible, as it would allow "Program Files" installations of Regnum Online on Windows Vista and Windows 7, not to mention the promotional benefits and bandwidth savings of getting into Linux distributions.

Regards.

[onemyndseye]

What Mikan said ;)

In the past I've goten around this by installing RO to /opt/regnum and setting modes and ownership to root:games +775

But RO updates sometimes break it by reverting ownership of a file or 2 back to root:root

[ArcticWolf]

What Mikan said ;)

In the past I've goten around this by installing RO to /opt/regnum and setting modes and ownership to root:games +775

But RO updates sometimes break it by reverting ownership of a file or 2 back to root:root

Why don't you run it under a custom regnum user? It should be possible to code a wrapper and handle the updates.

[onemyndseye]

I had thought of doing that as well but wouldnt you have to SUID? if so then it seems just as likely to stop working as my other method.

LOL... I just tried something that worked beautifully:

because of how RO behaves.. if you simply packaged up rolaucher and installed it to /usr/bin or whichever... RO patching behavior takes care of the "file overlay" method by creating ~/regnum and downloading the content needed from the patch server