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The Banana Peel
Freeciv 2.1.0 Beta 3 - Success! 
Monday, March 26, 2007, 3:26 PM
I finally figured out what was going awry. If you just want to play, head on over here to download it. If you are interested in what transpired, read on.

As it turns out, newest versions of the Pango library changed how the pangorc file is parsed. It used to understand double quotes, but no longer. Took me a lot of trial and error to figure this one out.

Anyway, I am glad things worked out. Now if I find some time, I will have to research the SDL client some more, since I am told that it has far less dependencies than the GTK client. If it pans out, perhaps it will reduce the size of the distribution as well.

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Freeciv 2.1.0 Beta 3 Progress Slows 
Friday, March 23, 2007, 6:29 PM
I was working on both the GTK+ client as well as the SDL client for beta 3. However, given the limited amount of time I can devote to the project, I have decided to focus on the GTK+ client.

But, I've hit a bit of a wall with it. While the game compiles and runs locally on my machine, I am having difficulty making it re-distributable.

It seems the matter at hand has to do with pango, a library used for the laying out and rendering of internationalized text.

When I attempt to run the supposedly re-distributable binary, I get the following warnings about this library:

(freeciv:2564): Pango-WARNING **: No builtin or dynamically
loaded modules were found. Pango will not work correctly.
This probably means there was an error in the creation of:
'/opt/local/etc/pango/pango.modules'
You should create this file by running pango-querymodules.

(freeciv:2564): Pango-WARNING **: pango_shape called with bad font, expect ugly output

(freeciv:2564): Pango-WARNING **: pango_font_get_glyph_extents called with null font argument, expect ugly output

(freeciv:2564): Pango-WARNING **: pango_font_get_metrics called with null font argument, expect ugly output

(freeciv:2564): Pango-WARNING **: _pango_cairo_font_install called with bad font, expect ugly output


The game does run, but rectangles are rendered instead of letters. So clearly there is something wrong. I just don't know what.

Since Freeciv is based on MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts), perhaps the MacPorts community can lend me some insight.

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Still Working On Freeciv 2.1.0 Beta 3 Package 
Tuesday, March 6, 2007, 6:36 AM
I decided that it was time I updated my development environment so that I can produce Freeciv 2.1.0-beta 3 with the latest dependency libraries. I even gave it a go to compile the SDL client.

The SDL client is very promising in that if it works, Freeciv can then run w/o needing X11. But, even though I was able to compile under Tiger, I cannot get it to run.

As far as the X11-based client, I am having isolating the various dependency libraries for GTK+ and Pango.

Work is on-going, but slowly. So stay tuned....

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Failure to Launch Freeciv 
Monday, February 26, 2007, 2:26 PM
More people continue to have issues launching Freeciv, even as of 2.0.9.

In trying to get it to work, some people went as far as installing MacPorts (formerly known as DarwinPorts), thinking that it is needed. This is simply not the case. While my Freeciv distributions are built using MacPorts, it does not need anything else except Tiger and X11 to run.

I tend to think that most issues have to do with the installation of X11.app. But since I only have access to the one Mac OS X installation that I perform the builds on, so I cannot say for certain.

If you are having issues launching Freeciv 2.0.9, give the following a try:
  1. Run the Aqua launcher at least once.
  2. Assuming X11 is launched, you should see that it has opened a window with the words xterm in its title bar.
  3. Click on this window to focus input on it, type and execute the command
    cd ~/Library/Application Support/Freeciv/2.0.9
  4. Type and execute the command ls. On my machine, executing the command shows the following:
    fonts           gtk-2.0         pango           run-freeciv.py
    
  5. The entry we are interested in run-freeciv.py. Assuming it exists on your machine, type and execute the command
    python run-freeciv.py
Now Freeciv is supposed to launch. Well, at least it does on mine.

If this workaround doesn't work for you, please let me know.
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Freeciv 2.0.9 and 2.1.0 beta 3 
Tuesday, February 20, 2007, 8:30 PM
Freeciv 2.0.9 is out. Head on over to here to download it.

In related news, 2.1.0 beta 3 has been released. I will free up time to work on it soon.
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