Meson build system

Tremulous Evil Genius Think Tank
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So I thought that porting to a new engine might be a pipe dream, and if it’s not, Tremulous might still be stuck with the current engine for a while. Might as well try to make the development easier to get into.

Here’s my experimental port of Tremulous to the Meson build system, which is also incidentally used by GNOME which I incidentally worship. When editing the game logic in particular, the rebuilds should be lightning-fast now.

Meson is an open source build system meant to be both extremely fast, and, even more importantly, as user friendly as possible.

The main design point of Meson is that every moment a developer spends writing or debugging build definitions is a second wasted. So is every second spent waiting for the build system to actually start compiling code.

Changes along the way:

  • More useful README.md file.

  • Added script to simplify running test servers.

  • Initial documentation about running servers.

  • Included assets as a git submodule.

  • Proper Linux installation, with .desktop and an icon.

  • Removed everything I don’t understand, because I’m dumb.

  • If fs_pk3PrefixPairs is empty, v11 and gpp prefixes are assumed.

  • GPP packages are now sorted before all other packages. It was necessary to fix UI being loaded from the 1.1 package.

  • The base game is now base, not gpp; this will provide potential developers with a map directory and a game data directory for a proper server file layout from the get-go.

Problems:

  • Need to figure out how to compile Windows .exe files.

  • Server crashes when players try to connect, this needs to be investigated.

  • Only dynamically loaded renderers.

  • No dynamically loaded OpenAL.

  • Not all built-in libraries are used for now.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: Consideration of Other Game Engines for Tremulous