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7 Installation

7.1 Quick start

7.1.1 GNU/Linux

Liquid War 6 is being developped on GNU/Linux, therefore it's the best supported platform.

Installing from sources with the 'usual' commands should work in most cases, provided you have the right libraries installed:

./configure
make
make install

Liquid War 6 relies on standard GNU tools:

7.1.2 Other UNIXish platforms

While Liquid War 6 has not been tested on all UNIX platforms, it should be possible to install it anywhere, as it does not really rely on any peculiar Linux kernel feature.

The most tricky part for porting games usually resides in the availability of the underlying graphical libraries.

7.1.3 Windows

While a port of Liquid War 6 on Microsoft Windows is not to exclude, it is clearly not a priority. As of today, Liquid War 6 has not been reported to run on this platform. But technically speaking, it should be possible, as the code is rather OS independant, and all the required libraries have been ported to Windows on 32-bit hardware.

If you have technical skills and are willing to try and compile Liquid War 6 on such a platform, go ahead, and send your patches 8-)

7.2 Dependencies

7.2.1 Required libraries

Before installing Liquid War 6, you'll absolutely need to install these libraries. Game will not compile or run without them. Period.

7.2.2 Optional libraries

These libraries are optional. You can compile the game without them, however, the resulting installation will obviously lack some features. Wether this is acceptable depends on your appreciation.

But you reasonnably need to have a least one graphical backend compiled. As of today, there is only one available, so you will probably end up installing all the mod-gl requirements.

A typical installation will use at least mod-gl and mode-ogg.

7.2.2.1 mod-gl requirements

As Liquid War 6 is not finished yet, mod-gl is required if you want to see something on your screen. Future versions will probably offer alternatives based on Allegro or even libcaca.

7.2.2.2 mod-csound requirements

You simply need to have libcsound installed, with its developpement headers and (shared) libraries, to enable this module.

Note that csounds itself has many dependencies.

As of today, the Liquid War 6 mod-csound module is not implemented yet, but it is planned that it will rely on csounds 4 (not 5).

7.2.2.3 mod-ogg requirements

This module obviously uses libogg but it's not linked directly to it. Instead, it uses:

7.3 3-D hardware and drivers

7.3.1 Is 3-D acceleration required?

Yes and no.

As of today, in its beta stage, only one graphical backend, or renderer, call it the way you want, has been developped. However the game has been designed so that implementing other backends can be possible in a reasonnable time. It is for instance actually planned to have at least one low-end 2-D renderer, very similar to the one in Liquid War 5. Meanwhile, there is only one backend, which has its pros and cons.

The default mod-gl graphical backend uses Mesa, a 3-D library which offers a high level API similar to OpenGL. While Liquid War 6 and mod-gl will compile and run with theorically any Mesa configuration, it might not run fast enough with software rendering only. The frame rate will probably be well below 10 fps, which is not acceptable.

The reason for it being so slow is that the OpenGL API was not really designed for software rendering. It is possible to achieve better performance in 2-D and 3-D graphics in software mode, but not using a high-level API like OpenGL. You need to get your hands in the dirt. On the other side, using Mesa is very comfortable, and when it is configured to use the 3-D features of the hardware, it runs faster than any pure software solution.

Therefore Liquid War 6 and mod-gl require some sort of hardware acceleration. And it will probably do for some time. The reason for using a 3-D library to provide acceleration is that fundamentaly, most recent hardware provide acceleration functions through their 3-D interfaces, and barely anything is done on the pure 2-D side.

The good news is that while Liquid War 6 and mod-gl require acceleration, it does not require any fast, recent or expensive video card. It can reasonnably be run on video cards which date from the last century. If not from the last millenium.

7.3.2 Choose your hardware carefully!

It is important, if you want to run Liquid War 6 and mod-gl in the best conditions, to have a hardware which provides acceleration, and for which a free (as in speech) driver is available. As GNU/Linux is the platform Liquid War 6 is being developped on, it is also the platform it is being designed for.

In a general manner, knowing which hardware devices support GNU/Linux is important not only for practical reasons—you want your hardware to work with the software that you want to use—but also for ethical and political reasons. You can help the free software movement by purchasing hardware from manufacturers who support our goals and not purchasing from those who don't.

See the list of hardware devices that support GNU/Linux for more informations.

Keep in mind that owning a hardware which has no driver for it will make Liquid War 6 and possibly any 3-D game simply unplayable.

7.3.3 List of working hardware

The following list describes some hardware configurations which are capable of running Liquid War 6 in correct conditions. This list obviously does not pretend to be perfect or exhaustive. If you know any other hardware capable of sufficient 3-D acceleration (fast enough to run Liquid War 6) with a free (as in speech) driver, please inform the maintainer.

7.3.3.1 Matrox G450

This card is fully supported under GNU/Linux.

You need to load the `mga' driver into the Linux kernel, and the XFree86 configuration file should contain a section like:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "G450"
        Driver          "mga"
        Option          "AGPMode" "2"
        VideoRam        32768
EndSection
7.3.3.2 ATI Radeon Mobility 9000

This card is supported under GNU/Linux. It is typically shipped with notebooks. Make sure to use the free (as in speech) driver. It exists and works.

Note that the ATI Radeon 9200 is the latest ATI card to be fully supported by a free driver. There is an effort to develop a free driver for recent ATI cards, but this is done through reverse engineering, for ATI do not give the specs of these recent cards. It is therefore extremely hard to write drivers for this hardware.

You need to load the `radeon' driver into the Linux kernel, and the XFree86 configuration file should contain a section like:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "ATI9000"
        Driver          "ati"
EndSection

7.3.4 OpenGL troubleshooting

Some recent versions of OpenGL drivers on GNU/Linux do not behave correctly with Liquid War 6. If you get the output:

liquidwar6gfx-sdl-gl: OpenGL renderer "Mesa GLX Indirect"
but usually have accelerated 3D rendering, try the following settings:
export LIBGL_DEBUG=1
export LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib/libGL.so.1"
First line will enable verbose OpenGL driver output, second line will hopefully fix the problem. Curiously, some programs do not seem to require the `LD_PRELOAD' hack.