Linux Porting Thread

[sado1]

Just out of interest, what are the advantages of not using Wine? Mostly performance?

Performance, my laptop will stop heating when simply running Remake twice. Also, I thought about advertising the Remake on, let's say, Linux Gaming Reddit, and there's not much point to come there and say "look, this works fine in Wine". Seeing as TSK was released for Linux (in the times when Linux games were like unicorns), there might be some potential old-new players out there. I won't deny that for a game that works so good on Wine (OpenGL games tend to be not that much of a problem for it) the advantages of a native port, except the performance, are not obvious to find.

I'll think about the installer.

[Nissarin]

I just downloaded/tested innoextract on gog KaM installer and it worked just fine, it even has the ability to make all names lower case (which might be useful). As for steam - afaik it's not possible to use regular Linux version of steam to download incompatible (Windows) apps but 'steamcmd' should be able to do so (it's command line application which primary use is to download/update game servers).
So what's left to do is to put it all into nice script, there are also some ready to use scripts to make installers under Linux, so you can put steamcmd, innoextract inside, add custom script to detect/download KaM and provide nice "clickable" version to users, well, assuming Linux version will actually materialize I can help with that.

[Lewin]

I just downloaded/tested innoextract on gog KaM installer and it worked just fine, it even has the ability to make all names lower case (which might be useful). As for steam - afaik it's not possible to use regular Linux version of steam to download incompatible (Windows) apps but 'steamcmd' should be able to do so (it's command line application which primary use is to download/update game servers).
So what's left to do is to put it all into nice script, there are also some ready to use scripts to make installers under Linux, so you can put steamcmd, innoextract inside, add custom script to detect/download KaM and provide nice "clickable" version to users, well, assuming Linux version will actually materialize I can help with that.

Something like that is probably the way to go, offer a few validation options like Steam and inno extractor. Although I'd prefer if the validation script isn't easy to read/edit since then people can bypass it too easily. I'd prefer to not spend much of my time on it since as sado said the advantages of a native release are fairly small and Linux users are a minority of our players.

[Nissarin]

Something like that is probably the way to go, offer a few validation options like Steam and inno extractor. Although I'd prefer if the validation script isn't easy to read/edit since then people can bypass it too easily.

It's certainly possible to mess with installation (validation) script but you need some knowledge of bash scripting, know which file to edit and (probably) know how to use terminal, so it all depends on your definition of easy. On the other hand is it really necessary to be so worried about it ?

I'd prefer to not spend much of my time on it since as sado said the advantages of a native release are fairly small and Linux users are a minority of our players.

If I manage some free time this weekend I'll try putting something together.

[Lewin]

It's certainly possible to mess with installation (validation) script but you need some knowledge of bash scripting, know which file to edit and (probably) know how to use terminal, so it all depends on your definition of easy. On the other hand is it really necessary to be so worried about it ?

I reckon most Linux users have enough knowledge to edit a bash script, at least to remove the code "if not valid then abort". If it is dead easy and widely known how to install the game without owning TPR then the publishers of KaM would most likely not be happy. So yes we don't want it to be easy to bypass.

On the other hand, if the Linux version comes with some files missing that must be taken from TPR (although there aren't many of those left because we've repacked most of the original games files into our own formats) then it doesn't matter if they modify the script, they still need to get those files to make the game run. We'll need to MD5 the files in case their version of TPR has a different version of the files though...

[Nissarin]

I reckon most Linux users have enough knowledge to edit a bash script, at least to remove the code "if not valid then abort".

Times change, since Linux is now more "user friendly" and some distributions try to hide the "ugly" details from them this is not necessary true anymore.

If it is dead easy and widely known how to install the game without owning TPR then the publishers of KaM would most likely not be happy. So yes we don't want it to be easy to bypass.

How do you validate the game under Windows ? I suspect you only check a few keys in the registry, nothing more, which is not that hard to bypass. And it's not like you can do much more than that on Linux - check a few locations (steam, wine) for presence of game files, perhaps look for installer package from gog. Also keep in mind that GOG installer is DRM free, it took me just a few seconds to find it on some torrent site, so you can get "original" version of the game pretty easily.
I don't think we need to overcomplicate things here and just trust the people they do/did the right thing.

On the other hand, if the Linux version comes with some files missing that must be taken from TPR (although there aren't many of those left because we've repacked most of the original games files into our own formats) then it doesn't matter if they modify the script, they still need to get those files to make the game run. We'll need to MD5 the files in case their version of TPR has a different version of the files though...

I'll get/include file listing from GOG version, it would be nice if someone provided the same list for steam version and perhaps original one (CD + patches, seems troublesome ), which files are exactly needed ?

BTW: I checked steamcmd, it not possible to install incompatible version, so people owning KaM on steam are out for luck. Even if there is some other way (using steam SDK or something) it might be too troublesome to include it in the installer.