Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Cross-Platform Development => Topic started by: chief1983 on March 11, 2017, 11:31:36 am

Title: Cross-platform tool support
Post by: chief1983 on March 11, 2017, 11:31:36 am
And no, I'm not just talking about FRED.  wxFRED is churning along at whatever pace it's churning, and will hopefully arrive some day.  But there are numerous other tools at this point that could maybe use a little cross platform attention which would help the community.

wxLauncher seems to be in a good state on the three major platforms, but I hope to test it on FreeBSD before 3.8.

PCS2 still has some issues compiling for Mac last I checked.  I am curious if anyone with a Linux desktop has had any success compiling and running it?

Knossos seems to be heavily developed with cross-platform support in mind, so I don't have too many concerns there.  But I imagine I will also be the one trying to supply builds of it for FreeBSD as well.

FS2 has a really nice nightly/release system in place now thanks mostly to m|m.  But it would be excellent if we could start expanding that to our other tools as well.  They don't see as much work but having this automated might ensure they keep working when they do have changes made, and that builds are available for testing by all.  It would also blueprint the build procedure for anyone else attempting to build from source on various platforms.  PCS2, wxLauncher, Knossos could all benefit from this.  wxLauncher and PCS2 are currently both already hosted on our SCP git org, but maybe we should discuss if we'd like to get Knossos under that umbrella at some point too, to benefit from our existing permissions configuration with users, third party hosts, etc.
Title: Re: Cross-platform tool support
Post by: m!m on March 11, 2017, 11:38:20 am
PCS2 works "fine" under Linux (it doesn't work with wxWidgets 3 yet though). I compiled and used it a few times already.

A CI and nightly environment for wxLauncher and PCS2 could be done but it will probably take some time, especially on Mac since I have no way of developing for that platform.
Title: Re: Cross-platform tool support
Post by: chief1983 on March 11, 2017, 01:25:02 pm
Good to hear about PCS2.  I'll do some more looking into the Mac issue and see if we can't get the big 3 working with it too.  Then we just need to improve visibility of releases, hopefully with the CI stuff.  I feel like PCS2 is the worst about "which build should I be using" types of questions these days.  I will do what I can to help with Mac and other platform support.  For what it's worth though, I have managed to set up usable VMs for both OS X and FreeBSD in VirtualBox that would probably be 'good enough' for anyone interested in doing their own cross platform testing.  The FreeBSD one can even start the actual game.
Title: Re: Cross-platform tool support
Post by: m!m on March 11, 2017, 03:17:07 pm
I have a MacOSX installation image but I never got it to run with VirtualBox because Apple had to do something special with their stuff. At that point I gave up on MacOSX support until either Apple or VirtualBox fix their issues.
Title: Re: Cross-platform tool support
Post by: chief1983 on March 11, 2017, 03:25:44 pm
I've had success with the ones with modified kernels to support more generic x86 hardware, generally these are your hackintosh images.  There's usually a howto somewhere for the latest mac version some time after its release.
Title: Re: Cross-platform tool support
Post by: niffiwan on March 12, 2017, 03:19:42 am
pretty sure the latest PCS2 uses wxWidgets 3 now, compiles & runs on Linux but has a few issues with displaying turret firepoints IIRC. Not sure if that's a Linux only issue or not.
Title: Re: Cross-platform tool support
Post by: macinlew on March 13, 2017, 02:45:16 pm
As a beginning macOS programmer would this be something I could help with? I’m certainly willing to try.
Title: Re: Cross-platform tool support
Post by: chief1983 on March 13, 2017, 09:10:48 pm
There are lots of places we could use help in polishing the macOS experience.  Just having another developer to take a look at any mac specific bugs that crop up can be nice.  We also have some tasks we would still like to accomplish such as getting macs moved to using an openal-soft framework instead of the default openal.framework.  We could use some help with any of the support apps on Mac too, including wxlauncher, pcs2, and knossos.  If you have any experience with cmake, especially mac peculiarities, that could be helpful.  That's all I can think of right now.  Probably more.  Oh yeah, if you have an interest in openal, there are still some mac graphics issues.
Title: Re: Cross-platform tool support
Post by: jg18 on March 13, 2017, 11:54:28 pm
*snip*

Oh yeah, if you have an interest in openal, there are still some mac graphics issues.
chief undoubtedly meant OpenGL. OpenAL is the audio library. :)


It's especially great to hear from a macOS coder; they're hard to come by. :yes:

EDIT: Correction.
Title: Re: Cross-platform tool support
Post by: chief1983 on March 14, 2017, 05:46:32 am
Yes I meant opengl, my phone apparently autocorrects it though.
Title: Re: Cross-platform tool support
Post by: macinlew on March 15, 2017, 05:07:35 pm
Great, where should I start?
Title: Re: Cross-platform tool support
Post by: chief1983 on March 15, 2017, 05:19:23 pm
I was hoping something in that list would jump out as more interesting than the rest.  Right at the moment, we need to work on pcs2 compilation with clang I think.  It needs reorganized so the third party libs get compiled with different flags, right now there are c code files being passed the cxx11 standard argument.  That or ngld could use some mac help with Knossos perhaps.  That is a project I would love to see keep moving forward this year.