The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Compiling UQM executables on Windows has always been difficult. Between installing mingw, configuring libraries, and puzzling through cryptic error messages, it has generally been the kind of thing only highly skilled people could do. Part of the reason for this is that people usually have to start from scratch, and install all libraries manually. This means no two people end up doing things exactly the same, leading to all sorts of problems which can be very difficult to track down. What is needed is a pre-built compiler system, with all libraries set up correctly for UQM to build against. This is an attempt to fill that need.

uqm-crossbuilder is a Debian Linux LiveCD image which contains a fully-configured Windows cross compiler. A cross compiler is a special kind of compiler which runs on one processor or operating system and produces code for another. The cross compiler in uqm-crossbuilder is designed to run on Debian Linux and produce Windows EXEs. It is preconfigured with all the libraries and other software UQM requires to build. All that is required to compile Windows executables with this system is a blank CD and some basic Linux command line knowledge.

To download the current uqm-crossbuilder image, please go to its GitHub download page:
https://github.com/oldlaptop/uqm-crossbuilder/downloads (https://github.com/oldlaptop/uqm-crossbuilder/downloads)

For help on using uqm-crossbuilder, please read the wiki here:
https://github.com/oldlaptop/uqm-crossbuilder/wiki (https://github.com/oldlaptop/uqm-crossbuilder/wiki)

Many thanks to Gekko for making his server available for building the ISO image, and for providing much-needed testing.

If you're still stuck after reading the wiki carefully, you can either post your questions in this forum thread
or try to talk to me on IRC. I can often be found in #sc2 and #uqm-arena on the Freenode network.

Very cool. I've had quite some issues with compiling for Windows before; either MSVC is being shit, MSYS doesn't want to coöperate, or MinGW conflicts with compilers on a proper Linux host.. This could be quite useful!

However, I thought that the entire workflow of this VM was a bit annoying with too much manual fiddling required, so I made a fork that uses Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/), Fabric (http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.5/) and Puppet (http://docs.puppetlabs.com/). It's available here (https://github.com/jorisvddonk/uqm-crossbuilder/tree/fabric_and_vagrant).

The only requirements for the client are Vagrant and Fabric (and Virtualbox). Vagrant is very easy to install, but Fabric can be slightly annoying to install on Windows. See the readme.md file on GitHub for details.

To set up a build system via this new method, clone the Git repo and run the following command via a commandline shell:
This command will automatically download an Ubuntu 12.10 image, which will then get provisioned via Puppet and prodded to coöperate via Fabric itself.

To download the UQM source and extract it on a location that's accessible by your Host operating system (e.g Windows):

To build UQM:

EDIT: compiled .exes currently seem to crash due to some resource loading issue.

My suspicion is that for some reason zlib is not being found, and your UQM builds therefore lack support for compressed content packs. You might try modifying the UQM build system to link -lz instead of -lzdll, or some such thing.

Okay, I located the source of the issues I was having.
It was a DLL issue. The DLLs you distribute at https://github.com/oldlaptop/uqm-crossbuilder/downloads don't seem to work correctly, even when using your ISO/VM to build UQM. When I used the DLLs from a vanilla UQM installation, it worked. I'm guessing it was an issue with libpng and sdl-image, because the errors I was getting were about unsupported image formats:

Hmm, maybe there's something off with the libsdl_image DLL. Try swapping that one out, it's entirely possible it's building without all the image loaders it needs. You can also try testing with the DLL that actually ends up inside your VM (/usr/i686-w64-mingw32/bin/*.dll). (also, the ISO on the Github downloads page is out of date at this time, there's a new one going up sometime today)


This is highly odd, I put that pack together precisely because it wasn't working for Gekko with vanilla DLLs. :P

Would this work to compile the HD version of Ur-Quan masters? I'm not having a lot of luck getting it to compile with VC++

There's no reason it shouldn't - I don't know if I still have an up-to-date ISO image up, but http://sourceforge.net/projects/oldlaptop.u/files/uqm-crossbuilder/uqm-crossbuilder-2013-08-06.iso/download should be fairly recent. I can be found on Freenode (#sc2) most GMT-5 evenings if you need help getting it to work :)

Thanks..

I eventually got it to compile with VC++ but had some issues with the side menu once I went into the game. What was highlighted was not what was selected. I tought it might be because I had the content from the beta1 zip file and the source from sourceforge/git, so I grabbed r1338 from googlecode and got an weird issue with the starting up and fading between black and white but not running..

The copy on sourceforge is currently the most up to date version correct? And the SVN copy on googlecode is stale?

I'm going to try it again with VC++ will a fresh checkout from sourceforge, now that I finally tracked down all the required libs..

If that doesn't work I may give this cross-compiler another go..

Thanks for this update btw..

Well the weird issue with starting up and fading between white but not running had something to do with my virtual machine, running in on a real machine it went just fine.

And syncing the source folder and the content folder to the right versions corrected the menu glitch.. so I'm compiling and running now in VS 2008..

I also tried it on a Win8 PC and it complained about the side by side inistall.. I imagine Win8 is missing some 32bit files that were needed..

Thanks

Github's filehosting service went away long ago - I can't edit the OP anymore, but the download link there is horrendously out of date. Current ISO images will be available here (http://sourceforge.net/projects/oldlaptop.u/files/uqm-crossbuilder/) for the foreseeable future.