AGS Editor and Linux (including Wine and Mono)

[bearseatbeats]

Howdy.

I've never posted here but I just want to mention first of all that the AGS is a whole lot of fun and some really cool projects wouldn't be possible without it, so it's much appreciated. Moving along...

I've been sort of goofing around with AGS this week and decided to try to run it in Linux (because I've really been enjoying running Ubuntu 7.10 lately and it's become my platform of choice). I don't know if you know this, but AGS v.2.72 seems to run just fine under Wine (v. 0.9.51), plus you can test the game fine as well (for some reason the mouse cursor slows down a bunch if you try to quit from the default in-game GUI but still responds). Not only that, but I was able to play Nelly Cootalot, Apprentice, and Apprentice 2 as well (albeit lacking Midi playback). Granted, I didn't load up a complicated game in the editor, just tested a room with the default character and some walk-able areas. Seemed to work though.

That brings me to my first question: Is there any reason I shouldn't be doing this? Does the compiler rely on some obscure part of windows where, if I manage to build a game under wine and try to compile it, that would somehow make it incompatible on any other platform? Could I build it in Wine and compile it in windows? (technically speaking) I realize that this is probably 100% untested, but has anyone out there ever tried this? I would be interested to know.

Also, as long as I was messing around with ver. 2.72 under Wine, I figured I'd try 3.0 RC4 for kicks. I managed to install IE6, the .NET framework, and the MS Installer v 2.0 (which were all dependant upon each other), then I also managed to install AGS 3.0 RC4 successfully. Unfortunately, running the editor didn't work (I wasn't expecting it to. I was surprised that 2.72 worked in the first place). It got me thinking though. I know that version 3.0 is written for the .NET framework. On Linux, there's a project called Mono (http://www.mono-project.com/) which is an implementation of .NET for Linux, Windows, OSX, and Unix. Now depending on how AGS 3.0 has been written, it would potentially be a lot easier then other versions to get working on Linux, through Mono in this case. This is all hypothetical, but it would be very cool. Any thoughts on that CJ? I realize that may not be your priority, but maybe the guy doing the Linux engine port has some insight. I can only hope. At the very least, maybe it would be possible to give the Wine people some more info (not source code, I read the FAQ) about how version 3.0 runs so that it might be supported in the future...?

I use Windows when I have to, but I don't really want to. Plus I find that I have to less and less. It would just be nice to see such a fine editor run on some other important platforms.

Thanks again for bringing AGS to the world. Happy Festivus everyone.

[scotch]

As long as you can compile exes with the editor it should work fine, the game is compiled to a special AGS format and appended to a precompiled AGS engine, so there shouldn't be a distribution problem.

As for AGS 3.0 on .net, it has come up before. I'm not sure how good mono's compatability is these days, but in any case it wouldn't work on pure mono because there's still some native Windows code there in a dll.

[deadsuperhero]

Actually, the Christmas game I coded for Moonbeam games was done entirely on WINE, on Ubuntu. I was surprised, it worked great! (Although, this computer has a slow processor and no sound card. That was a pain to work with.)

[bearseatbeats]

As for AGS 3.0 on .net, it has come up before. I'm not sure how good mono's compatability is these days, but in any case it wouldn't work on pure mono because there's still some native Windows code there in a dll.

Right, I'm sure there's some windows dependant coding in there too, but it seems like it would take less work to port the editor to Mono than it would to create a Linux native version of the 2.7x branch. I'm not saying it would take no work, just less work (hypothetically. I don't know what the proportion of windows dependant code is). Now this begs the question, would it be possible to move the codebase entirely to Mono (since it's already cross-platform and you wouldn't have to rewrite the engine for each port). It would mean that you would reach way more people with just a little more effort. Of course, then you have to determine what kind of executable would be compiled by the editor...all three variants? There's got to be a way to do it. I don't know if this is technically possible, but it's a good idea. At least it would end the "whan, I want a linux port" threads :-)

Oh, also, I got midi to work with AGS games in Wine by installing Timidity and a soundfont (check instructions here http://frankscorner.org/index.php?p=mid). It's about 90% perfect, but I wouldn't recommend it if you use a slower processor. I'm using a p4 2.2 GHz and the midi rhythm tracks are sometimes not in sync with the melody tracks. It's not bad though. Depends on the game. I used ALSA drivers with the "Driver Emulation" option checked in the Wine audio properties.

Alliance, good to know someone's done it. That gives me hope :-)