30/07/2006 @13:28:00 ^14:18:03

AT THE DROP OF A HAT I WILL THROW UP INTO A DROPPED HAT

barf

Patches accepted; Ports ported; segfaults fixed; much rejoicing

Things seem to be going pretty well! The PrBoom developers accepted that patch I made from Eternity's fix for the dropoff overflow. It's also gone into PrBoom-Plus! Yes, I am excited. Can I write "contributes to open source software" on my CV yet?

Speaking of PrBoom-Plus, apparently it builds on Linux now. I mean, I haven't tested this, and you could get it to work before by making a number of small changes to the code, but still. That was always one of my gripes about it. In fact the developers of both flavours of PrBoom are working together and seem to be on fire at the moment, there have been two (EDIT: three, hahaha) new versions released and more commits in the past month than the whole of 2005.

Other engines have recently added Linux support too. Chocolate Doom has always had it, Doom Legacy was even in Debian once until they realised it contained non-free code and took it out. Eternity appears to have gained an Autotools-based build system but requires a more recent version of SDL than is in Sarge. ZDoom has a Makefile.linux and has had some kind of support for some time - I managed to get it to build back in 2004. But it depends on non-free libraries so installing was a pain, and - while it ran okay - when I tried to leave, it crashed and took X along with it. But that's probably improved by now, you'd hope so anyway. Free software Doom is looking really strong right now.

But I'll probably stick with PrBoom for the moment, I am bloody-mindedly loyal like that. If you can call hacking on an abandoned branch of it loyalty, that is... But that's going pretty well too because this week I fixed the other two of the Three Great Annoying Crash Bugs That Have Plagued This Thing Since Forever (the Netcode Segfault, which is what I was talking about if you've ever heard me bitch about random segfaults, and a very rare crash when you exited the map which turned out to be savegame-related; the third was the dropoff overflow) Good news because they were all things I considered were release blockers.