[tr909]

Woohaa Beta3 is out (looks like file was created yesterday 14 dec 2003 !)
Looks like point 1 and 3 are done Yes! cross platform networking. How do we get mission-briefing speech/sound? I had no luck on getting freespace2 CD's on ineternet. Can someone post a BitTorrent Distro of the 3 CD's ? would be great...

[Kazan]

I think what we really should do is port everything into SDL - then we have one tree that does everything (with slight #ifdef's for things like reverse byte order on macs, etc)


eventually we're going to have to overhaul this stuff from the ground up there is only so far we can go

[redmenace]

tr909
what is your location? In the US. I might mail you a copy since no one seems to want to fess up tp owning the rights.

[tr909]

Redmenace (as noted in private message) thanx for your help. i already found the 3CD set on BitTorrent (suprnova.org) all you people out here who haven't got it (original) Freespace2 and Freespace1+extras are available.

Some mac question: i installed in virtualPC on a shared-folder and ran update-patch (from freespace2.com) i can't run the game because my VPC does not have 3D accelleration. After this i tossed in the Beta3 for MacOSX and it is playing. I have question. Do any of you have files in data/voices and in data/sounds? they are empty here. The underdog version has WAV files in these folders... Also briefing voices and movies aren't playing :-(

[taylor]

All of the WAV files are in the various .VP archives depending on what the particular WAV is used for.  The Underdogs version has the files extracted which causes various problems, including crashes and excessive CPU usage from 0 byte anis, with the Linux and therefore the OSX version.  The icculus.org code is not going to be modified to make the Underdogs version work correctly so please don't ask.

Movies need to go in Data/Movies (may or may not be case sensitive) in order to be played with the current player code.  The new code, that I haven't finished the audio on yet, uses CFILE to locate the movies in all directories that CFILE manages, including the CD-ROM.  As soon as I get the movie audio to stream correctly it will be added to CVS.

Briefing voices and music don't work yet in the icculus.org code.  The decoder for the sound data is there but I haven't finished the streaming code and plugged it all together yet.  I haven't had much time to work on it over the past month but I plan to get back to it this month so working code should be available soon.  When it is done the streaming code will be added to FSO as well.

[tr909]

Great to hear that Taylor. i now have the original as well as the underdog version. (the movies play fine after a straight copy from the CD, so probably not case sensitive on OSX). Your post explaines a lot, thanx. i hope tigital reads this too because i emailed him another crash report for Freespace2 (where i also asked this sound issue). Also i guess Panther (OSX 10.3.x) is a bit different. Beta3 seems a bit unstable on Panther. but i'm really pleased with how far the port already is :-) thanx guys (and girls?)

[Clave]

Well, I have all the tigital files now, so I need to buy a retail copy of FS2 for the PC?

Is it still on sale? or do I need to use eBay?

[karajorma]

You've got a lot of choices actually. If you can find a retail copy you can buy it. Ebay is sadly the place most likely to have it though and it's expensive there.

 You can get these bitTorrents
if you have a bit torrent client.

Personally I think that's your best option but...

The Home of the Underdogs version is limited because a lot of the files are missing. but there should be everything you need to actually play the game in there.  (Which means you can get up and playing quickly if the big BitTorrent looks like it's going to take a long time to download).
My HotU FAQ will tell you where you can get the rest of the files although there are some new sources that iaren't in my FAQ yet which can be found on this thread.

[Taristin]

But if you get the HOTU version, I have shareaza running, and the other VP files should be available if you search. I even posted direct URN's (I think that's the technical name for them) in BD's "Guys, seriously" thread...

[taylor]

The HotU version does NOT work with the Linux/OSX code.  You can possibly get it to work a little but it will crash constantly in mission, if the mission even loads.  You've got to make a lot of changes to get everything in a set of VPs in order for the files to be found and used but that's not an easy task.  If you can get the individual VPs then that's fine but stay away from HotU unless you run Windows.

If possible go for the torrents.  That way you get the full game, already packaged in VPs and ready to use.  I'm not sure if it's ISOs or not but if so then some of the needed files will be in InstallShield CAB files.  To extract them on the Mac grab this little command line utility.  Only the source is available but if you can't get it to compile let me know and I'll build and post a binary for you.

[karajorma]

Thanks Taylor. Can you tell me why the HotU build doesn't work? Is it cause it only checks the VP files and ignores data?

If you noticed the thread on General Freespace I've been talking about improving the HotU build. One of the first changes I'd make would be to put as much as possible into VP files (I suggested it cause it would make it much easier to upgrade from HotU to a full Retail version). I've got no problem with trying to make it as Linux/Mac OS X compatible as possible while I'm there though.

[taylor]

Originally posted by karajorma
Thanks Taylor. Can you tell me why the HotU build doesn't work? Is it cause it only checks the VP files and ignores data?

Filenames are case sensitive on the disk.  Files in a VP are not though so it's causes less problems to put them there.  The problem comes when the game requests a filename with a particular case and even though that file may exist it may have a different case (mixed/lower/upper).  FS2_Open is a little different in that it converts everything to lowercase when looking.  While that's good sometimes there are many files that are written to disk in mixed case (pilot files for instance) and most still exist only in mixed case so it could find the file in mixed case but then look again later in lower case and the file wouldn't be found.  Kind of a pain but no way around that on a case sensitive filesystem.

Getting the files in a VP is all that should be needed to fix it.  Why that's difficult at the moment is that many animation and sound files are zero byte and you can't put zero byte files in a VP.  One other issue that can occur with zero byte anis is when it tries to show nothing, CPU usage goes through the roof on those frames (mostly interface).  It's likely a small glitch in the way the whole ani/texture system works but I never bothered to fix it in the code.  Previously I had created single from anis to replace the zero byte versions, where that single frame was green (transparent) so it could still load but not be visible.  The zero byte sound files just need something in them which would be seen but seen as invalid.  I just put "I AM NOT A SOUND FILE" in each of them and that did the trick.

It's really difficult to get the end user to do all of the needed work to use the HotU version though so for the icculus.org version we just made it "officially unsupported" and tell people not to use it.  Getting it Linux/OSX friendly would be cool though so if you have questions or need help (testing or whatever) then let me know.

[Taristin]

I was just suggesting the HotU because I do have the original VP files (all of them) in my shared folder. I've just not had any DLs yet.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by taylor
Getting the files in a VP is all that should be needed to fix it.  Why that's difficult at the moment is that many animation and sound files are zero byte and you can't put zero byte files in a VP.  

Is that a limitation of the VP format itself or of the VP tools?

Originally posted by taylor
It's really difficult to get the end user to do all of the needed work to use the HotU version though so for the icculus.org version we just made it "officially unsupported" and tell people not to use it.  Getting it Linux/OSX friendly would be cool though so if you have questions or need help (testing or whatever) then let me know.

I know what you mean. The main reason I was thinking of upgrading HotU was precisely because it's such a pain in the neck to upgrade it to a full version for PC users. I didn't realise that it was even worse for Mac and Linux people.  Probably is better just to tell them to go to the various places where PC owners will be getting the VP files anyway.

I'll try to make sure that the version I make has at least a couple of complete VPs in it though (Sparky as well as Root most likely) cause that way we cut down on the need to have people download those two at least (Which would cut down on some of the traffic on the FTP server).

[StratComm]

I'd imagine of the format itself; compression algorighms of any sort tend to have trouble with compressing absolutely nothing and if the VP is a block of data with pointers to all of its files, then 0 byte files will break the pointer sequence.  In short, I think it's a failing of the VP format but one that's needed to simplify the reading process.

[taylor]

Originally posted by karajorma
Is that a limitation of the VP format itself or of the VP tools?

It's the VP format itself but not really a flaw of any kind.  A VP is basically a filesystem so it stores basic info on files, directories, and the content of those files.  In order to access those files it needs some kind of index to tell where they are located in the system.  For a normal filesystem it's inodes (for *nix stuff) or like the FAT (the actual allocation table of available files) for Windows.  CFILE uses offsets to find the files in a VP and though it could store the basic info of a zero byte file inside of the VP it can't reference it's location since it takes no space and an offset to it's location would actually be the next file in the system.  A badly written VP creater tool might allow those zero byte files in the VP by mistake and that would cause all sorts of issues in CFILE.

It's done with offsets in order to save space so that that VP is never larger than what's required by the files stored in it.  A regular filesystem (eg, FAT32/NTFS) would store files in blocks of something like 4k.  Even a 0 byte file is taking 4k of space but it has to do that in order to keep track of the files (and speed, or whatever other reason the filesystem needs a particular block size for).

Uhh, maybe a little more than you wanted to know there but that's the reason why.

[karajorma]

Actually it was all pretty useful

I guess that does mean that I'm not going to be able to stick the entire contents of HotU's data folder into a vp then. I'll find another way to simplify things though

[StratComm]

It'd take a lot of work, but a bunch of 1-byte files should be fine.  Just a single ASCII character should be enough to get a VP to reference it correctly.  It just needs some data, instead of an empty file with a name.

[karajorma]

The problem with 1 byte files is the game might try using them and crash out thinking that they are corrupt. I'll give it a try

[WMCoolmon]

The chief problem is that a VP file uses a filesize of 0 to denote a directory...the format would have to be upgraded in order to use some other method for determining a directory.