NeL on Debian testing

NeL is an awesome gaming engine that features collisions, OpenGL, sound and a lot of great features. It can be found here. Yes, it is licensed under the GPL. NeL is the engine behind the impressive The Saga Of Ryzom MMORPG.

Having had so much trouble with Ogre, Neoengine and a lot of other engines on Etch (given the use of GCC 4, and all those projects being developed using GCC 3.3), I tried to build it to no avail. Then it hit me: debootstrap (actually it was suggested to me by someone on IRC). I installed a version of Debian sarge on a chrooted jail and used it to build NeL on Etch.

The detailed instructions are here.

Next on I'm going to try and build Ogre on this chrooted jail.

OGRE in Etch

I'm having a lot of trouble compiling OGRE on Debian Etch. In the OGRE site they claim the 4.0 version of GCC will give trouble at runtime, so I forced the compiler to 3.3 before the './bootstrap && ./configure && make' step:

export CC=gcc-3.3
export CXX=gcc-3.3

But the current CVS tree fails to compile (it also fails with GCC 4). The latest Azathoth release (1.0.5) fails to compile on GCC 3. Compilation succeeds with GCC 4, but running any program linked with OGRE causes a segfault. Since there are prebuilt .DEBs for Debian Sid I decided to track the problem, and as expected the same bug is present in the build.

The bug says the problem has been recently fixed, so I downloaded the .DEBs from Sid, which complained for the following dependencies:

libopenexr2c2
libpng12-0
libzzip-dev

I did a:

aptitude install libpng12-0 libzzip-dev

And then crossed my fingers and forced the installation of all the archives:


dpkg -i --force-all libogre5_1.0.5-1_i386.deb     libogre5-dbg_1.0.5-1_i386.deb     libogre-dev_1.0.5-1_i386.deb     ogre-doc_1.0.5-1_all.deb     ogre-tools_1.0.5-1_i386.deb


So far it has worked without a glitch for me. I'm using Anjuta+OGRE and all works perfectly, given that the libopenexr2c2 dependency was not met, but I'm not using the OpenEXR format, so everything should keep working.